As digital images proliferate, artists are making photos the slow, smelly way
WILLIAM HENRY FOX TALBOT did not set out to be a photographer. He was inspired by friends who made exact drawings using a camera obscura—a dark room with a small hole in one side, which projects an inverted image of the outside view onto the opposite wall. An indifferent draughtsman, Talbot wished that by some trick the drawings could make themselves. By experimenting with chemical-coated paper, he found a way to do just that.
Louis Daguerre’s images, imprinted on metal rather than paper, were sharper. Initially, as the two men competed in the mid-19th century, the daguerreotypes he pioneered were more popular. But Talbot’s innovation led more directly to photography as it is understood today. Daguerreotypes were unique artefacts; Talbot’s calotype was a paper negative that could yield any number of positive copies. Over time his idea led to the development of photography as a form of infinite reproduction.
Fast forward to the digital age, and people take so many snaps that they clog smartphones and hard-drives. In response, photographers are revisiting techniques from the art’s earliest days to produce, once again, arresting and unique pictures from slow, smelly processes.
At Photo London, a fair held in May, Hans Kraus junior, a New York-based dealer in antique photography, curated a display of works by Talbot, his modern disciples and followers of Daguerre. An English artist, Cornelia Parker, has revived Talbot’s photogravure process: a sheet of metal is covered in light-sensitive chemicals, then objects are laid directly onto it. Exposure hardens the chemicals, except under the covered parts. Removing the objects and washing the sheet with an acid leaves a kind of engraved plate that can be used to make prints. Ms Parker did that with some glassware Talbot had also photographed, the glass emerging as diaphanous black on a white background.
What was once a retro hobby now accounts for a growing segment of the art-photography scene; Mr Kraus reckons the number of artists experimenting with such methods is rising at an “exponential” rate. Irene Kung, a Swiss artist, begins with the height of modern technology: a digital camera with exceptional resolution. That yields enormous electronic files with exquisite detail, which she manipulates in software and then uses to generate photo negatives. From there, the real fun begins.
Ms Kung and an expert printer lay the negative on a piece of paper coated in ferric, chloroplatinite and chloropalladite salts. The resulting print is bathed in a solution derived (she says with delight) from spinach. The outcome is razor-sharp black-and-white images—in Ms Kung’s case, of landmarks such as the Brooklyn Bridge or La Scala opera house in Milan—against a ghostly black background. Each print takes a full day to make, and is slightly different from any other.
By contrast, Vera Lutter uses modern chemistry but the oldest of cameras. In the 1990s she turned the window of her apartment in New York into an eye, drilled a pinhole as a lens and used a huge piece of photographic paper as a kind of retina, creating a modern camera obscura. She thought her experiment would be short-lived, but the subsequent work proved popular. She often builds wooden cameras on-site, favouring industrial and architectural subjects (pictured), though at Photo London Mr Kraus exhibited a serene treescape she made in Cold Spring, New York, rendered eerie by the reversal of black and white.
What all these artists have in common is that, in today’s world, their output hardly seems like photography at all. Ms Lutter trained in conceptual art in Munich. Ms Kung began as a painter. Ms Parker makes sculptures and installations; her technique results not in photographs but photograms (the name for images produced by contact between objects and paper). They did not set out to be photography pioneers. But then, neither did Talbot.