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| Oscar Gustave Rejlander (Swedish, 1813–1875). Lionel, Emily, Alfred, and Hallam Tennyson, circa 1862. Albumen print from wet plate collodion negative. Collection of Michael Mattis and Judith Hochberg. |
Saturday, August 4, 2012
David Adams' portraits on film canisters
In his series 36 Exposures, David Emitt Adams used 35-mm film canisters discarded by students in his Introduction to Photography course as a medium for portraiture: "I employed a labor-intensive, 19th century, chemical photographic procedure known as the wet plate collodion process to make the students’ photographs on the very film canisters that played a crucial role in their initial understanding of photography." Very cool.
Below, a vintage collodion print of a famous British author and his family. The process seems to be having a resurgence, as there is even a "wet plate colloidon day."
Thanks to our shutterbug guru Judy Rolfe for the link! And here are some Daedalus resources on innovations in photography.
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Tennyson is wearing some BIIIIIG PANTS!!! :-O
ReplyDeleteno, but that photo is really amazing. i really appreciate the lack of anything man-made in the photo, other than the clothing, which i'm sure was produced by hand rather than machine.
i don't know why David Adams decided to use such an old method to produce his prints, perhaps it was necessary to develop the photos on the backs of those canisters.. but i always enjoy when trash is used in creative endeavors. they remind me of old cigarette pack baseball cards.
Me too; I love art pieces (or anything) made from recyclable materials.
ReplyDeleteThe Tennyson photo, likely caused by its age, but more from the development method, looks like it was plucked from a memory.
ReplyDeleteYou can also almost see a woman's face superimposed over the image, like a portrait, if you let your eyes step back a bit.
The blurness of the background is more likely due to a shallow depth-of-field and a slight overexposure needed to bring out the features of the family. Wet plate collodial negatives are known to be fine grained, hence their lingering popularity.
ReplyDeleteI went through a phase of interest in photography when in my teens. Then everything became pixels and all that study went adrift. Now a Congressman can lose his career in a photo faster than I can develop one.
Is there an advantage to this method over the heat transfer thing they do nowadays?
ReplyDelete