What is so enthralling about photographs made using ancient techniques? With digital technology spurring the creation of captivating new imagery, how do “alternative processes” advance artistic expression? The glorious answer to that can be experienced in “A New and Mysterious Art”, the group show curated by Jerry Spagnoli at Howard Greenberg Gallery in New York through October 29, 2016.
From the series “My Ghost, 2014” Daguerreotype by Adam Fuss (courtesy of Cheim & Reid, NY).
The mindfully selected works could be a primer for the handmade crafting of photographs, with a kaleidoscope of methodologies, sizes, shapes and subject matter on view. A concise description of each technique serves to complete a tasty tutorial. But this is no history lesson. Save for one diminutive gem, a nine-plate Daguerreotype of musicians (including a violin-touting toddler), all of the photographs were created by contemporary artists. Viewing the range of work, you might surmise that the similarities end there, but you’d be missing something I think is important.
“Untitled (Self-Portraits), 2012” Unique collodion wet-plate positives on metal with sandarac varnish, in nine parts, by Sally Mann (courtesy of Edwynn Houk Gallery, NY).
It takes a special kind of artist to embrace the craft of photographic processes whose results owe almost as much to serendipity as to heroic levels of patience and disciplined training. And yet these labor-intensive methodologies call like a siren song to those striving to capture the sweep of time and history. Each of these artists is in some way trying to wrap the weight of the past into the present. Or in certain cases, like Stephen Berkman’s amusing albumin prints such as “Shetl Schtick”, “Merkin Merchant” and “The Songbird and the Sharpshooter”, they suggest alternative views to the prevailing historical narrative.
“The Songbird and the Sharpshooter” albumen print by Stephen Berkman (courtesy of the artist and Howard Greenberg Gallery, NYC).
But humor is something of an outlier for most who choose alternative processes. The youthful Japanese Takashi Arai uses his stunning Daguerreotypes to “store memory”, drawing parallels between the devastating effects of nuclear power in the WWII bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the recent Fukushima power plant disaster. Arai’s knockout multi-plate mural “A Maquette for a Multiple Monument for B29: Bockscar” from his 2014 series Exposed in a Hundred Suns, is searing, not nostalgic, bringing the fatefulness of a nuclear-plagued Japan into focus as past and present converge in his mirrored images.
“A Maquette for a Multiple Monument for B29: Bockscar, 2014”, Daguerreotype from the series Exposed in a Hundred Suns (courtesy of the artist and Howard Greenberg Gallery, NYC).
Some pay homage to the magic of photography itself, as in the tributes to William Henry Fox Talbot (an original inventor in 1839) by artists Dan Estabrook and the team France Scully Osterman and Mark Osterman. Visiting Talbot’s beloved Lacock Abbey in England, they each coaxed Talbot’s vision into the present, enlarging it into their philosophies on the medium. The Ostermans’ atmospheric, color-infused nuances and Estabrook’s magical, mysterious diptychs are imbued with an unmistakable and endearing modern slant.
“Conjurer’s Hand, 2002” Unique diptych of waxed calotype negative and salt print by Dan Estabrook (courtesy of the artist and Howard Greenberg Gallery, NYC).
“Breakfast at the Rectory, 2010” Archival pigment print from photogenic drawing negative by France Scully Osterman and Mark Osterman (courtesy of the artist and Howard Greenberg Gallery, NYC).
The portrait work seems especially weighted with poetic overtones of fate, memory and loss, from Sally Mann’s ghostly, ethereal self-portraits to Craig Tuffin’s moving portraits of Australian Aborigines (see feature image) and Matthias Olmeta’s plaintive South American youths from the series “Letter to my grandchildren 5”.
“Khansine, 2016” from the series “Letter to my grandchildren 5” Ambrotype, wet collodion on acrylic glass, varnish paint and gold leaf (courtesy of the artist and Howard Greenberg Gallery, NYC).
Whatever creative choices these artists make, every carefully selected process leaves its unique marks upon the end photograph, conferring sometimes ghostly, ethereal images, sometimes mirrored or negative images, but always something inimitably personal and indelibly distinctive. A new narrative.
The artists included in this exhibit are Takashi Arai, Stephen Berkman, Dan Estabrook, Adam Fuss, Luther Gerlach, Vera Lutter, Sally Mann, Matthias Olmeta, France Scully Osterman & Mark Osterman, and Craig Tuffin. Many of their works are being shown for the first time here.
For more information about this show, go to: http://www.howardgreenberg.com/exhibitions/a-new-and-mysterious-art/selected-works?view=slider#21
A related event, the annual 19th-Century Photography Conference and Show presented by the Daguerreian Society, will be held in New York from October 19—23, 2016, at the Wyndham New Yorker Hotel. More information is available at www.daguerre.org
Feature Image: “Yahna Ganga, 2014” Ambrotype by Craig Tuffin (courtesy of the artist and Howard Greenberg Gallery, NYC).
“View from Talbot’s Grave, 2010” Archival pigment print from photogenic drawing negative by France Scully Osterman and Mark Osterman (courtesy of the artist and Howard Greenberg Gallery, NYC).
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