Announcement:

Hello,

I am very happy to announce that I will be making Tintype portraits of people at this year's Supernormal Festival between the 9-11th August. I will be using an 1850's British Half-plate camera and a portable dark tent to make a portrait wall of the festival goers. Supernormal is only in its 4th year but is a great, very-small and family friendly festival in the fields of Braziers Park - an amazing artist-run commune. The festival seeks to combine experimental music and art and I hope that I will be able to get a few group portraits of the bands in too.

Full details here: http://www.supernormalfestival.co.uk/

Frightful Imprecations.

Photographing Prisoners.

On Saturday morning last a ludicrous scene was witnessed in the Preston Police Station. As is known, al persons charged with felony, etc, are compelled to have their photographs taken, so that the police authorities may “mark” them and  identify them in other places if ever they should offend again. Following out this practice, a female convicted of felony was was on Saturday ordered to stand in the Preston Police Station whilst hetr likeness was taken. But to this she evinced a decided repugnance, and threatened to knock the photographer and his appliances down if he attempted to take her portrait. The police insisted, and ashe as pertinaciously  reppelled their efforts, and threw herself upon her back on the  floor. On being raised up she drew her hair over her face, and swore they should not have her photograph. Seeing that persuasion was of no avail, the constables had to use violence, and whilst one clutched her firmly about the body another drew her hair back and held it  tightly behind her head. Though thus secured, she employed another means to defeat their purpose, and this was by making the most ludicrous grimaces and putting out her tongue. She would, she said, rather serve ten years penal servitude than than that they should take her photograph. The photographer, after repeated attempts, which occupied little short of and hour, succeeded in at last securing something like a normal likeness; and the woman, who continued to use frightful imprecations, was conducted to the police cell.

British Journal of Photography, November 2^nd, 1877

Images from ledgers of police records dating to the 1870s found in an archive.....somewhere.

Ideologies.

There are bodies and spaces. The bodies – workers, vagrants, criminals, patients, the insane, the poor, the colonized races – are taken one by one: isolated in a shallow, contained space; turned full-face and subjected to an unreturnable gaze; illuminated, focused, measured, numbered and named; forced to yield to the minutest scrutiny of gestures and features. Each device is the trace of a wordless power, replicated in countless images, whenever the photographer prepares an exposure, in police cell, prison, mission house, hospital, asylum, or school. The spaces, too – uncharted territories, frontier lands, urban ghettos, working class slums, scenes of crime – are confronted  with the same frontality and easured against an ideal space: a clear space, a healthy space, a space of unobstructed lines of sight, open to vision and supervision;a desirable space in which bodies will be changed into disease free, orderly, docile and disciplined subjects; a space, in Foucoult’s sense, of a new strategy of power knowledge. For this is what is at stake in missionary explorations, in urban clearance, sanitary reform and health supervision, in constant, regularised policing – and in the photography which furnished them from the start with so central a technique.

What we have in this standardized image is more than a pictire of a supposed criminal. It is a portrait of the product of the disciplinary method: the body made object; divided and studied; enclosed in a cellular structure of space whose architecture is the file-index; made docile and forced to yield up its truth; separated and individuated; subjected and made subject. When accumulated, such images amount to a new representation of society.

From; Tagg, John, The Burden of Representation: Essays on Photographies and Histories, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1988

Images from ledgers of police records dating to the 1870s found in an archive.....somewhere.

How Do You Get To Carnegie Hall? Part 1

...Practice, Practice, Practice - or so goes the joke.

I will be giving a paper at my first conference (or should that be 'my first paper at a conference' - or even 'my first paper anywhere!') in a couple of weeks and in that time honoured tradition I don't feel remotely ready yet I feel strangely unnervous about it. 

It is a conference called Devils and Dolls: Depictions of the Dichotomous Child and is being held at the University of Bristol (not Carnegie Hall, unfortunately), so it should feel all very proper and everything. I am giving a paper called (excitingly), 'Sentiment and Science: The 'Before and After' Child in the Barnardo's Children Photographs'. I added the 'Sentiment and Science' part recently because all the other speakers had really exciting titles and mine felt really dull.  

                         

One thing I really hate in writing something is when you have all this STUFF and you know it all matters and its all appropriate but yo can't possibly SQUEEZE it into a 20 minute lecture and you don't even know where to begin and despite all the things that the internet can do it still can't invent a good program where you can see all your notes and images and stuff in an easy way like in the CSI and Law and Order where they start piecing together all the clues on a big clipboard and that coloured string gets EVERYWHERE and don't even get me started on Scrivener - I know it has a pinboard function but its crap, quite frankly, so I might as well actually resort to getting an actual, real clipboard from Wilkinson's and actually, really printing my images and quotes and bits off and sticking them all up on the actual, real clipboard in actual, real time and space and EVERYTHING.

So, in an effort to try to make sense of all the information and pictures I have I thought the best way to do it would be  to actually write my slides as blog posts and post them online - at least to give me a sense of what I am trying to do/say.
This strikes me as rather a good idea but in the meantime, I actually started working on individual slides and I think they are coming together a bit better. Sorting out how the images are gonna play helped me to think about what i'm going to say. 

Seaside Tintypes:

I went along to the London Photo Fair the other day. My heart wasn't really in it and I got there way too late but I did manage to pick up this nice seaside tintype for my ongoing research. Its hard to tell whether it really is an actual Tintype-taken-on-or-near-a-seaside but it was labelled as such and I think I see sand in the foreground and beach huts in the background. As with many seaside Tintypes - poor conditions, equipment, chemicals, etc - this didn't really speak to me 'til I scanned it in and started doing the old Blade Runner on it and it is really quite a nice image. Its a shame that many of these will never really be appreciated in their original state as to the naked eye they are just too murky, dark and/or fuzzy.

Here are a few more from my collection or whose images have been kindly lent to me for my research.

Probably 1870s. Kindly lent by James Downs.

1870s-1890s. Kindly lent by Paul Godfrey.

As can be seen in the next couple itinerants were more prevalent on the beaches of England well into the 30s and 40s until the film 'snappers' and 'walkies' started to come in (and that is a whole other area of study, namely the ever helpful Mr. Paul Godfrey's). These guys would have been old itinerants who most likely learnt their trade decades before. It is interesting that this short-lived format lasted so long on the beaches of England and Scotland (particularly Scotland for some reason), but as you can see from these, the results at the time were pretty shoddy - mostly due to using the cheapest of materials and chemicals - and they haven't aged the images well.

It seems that at some point in the 1920s somebody started marketing these card-stock sleeves and selling them to the tintypists. Whenever I find a seaside tintype dating after the '20s it will unfailingly have the same style card stock, even with the same designs.

Kindly lent by Paul Godfrey.

These later ones are ugly little things, but they stand as a precursor to the period when everyone had a Kodak or equivalent and for that they plug an interesting gap in our social history and of the little explored subject of the history of leisure in this country. As can be seen, these guys were opportunists, snapping people siting along piers or on the pebbles. I've even seen some of these that don't look like they were taken anywhere near a beach, but still fit into the category of leisure/holidays in some way.

On Art & Science:

Artist Melanie K has a nice blog she calls Beyond The Violet where she makes a cyanotype everyday for a year. Seemingly banal items are given a strange hue and look really good in the frieze-like format she displays them on her blog.

It would appear that she is studying Science and Art which is an interesting combination. The history of photography is, of course, tightly wound up with 20th century science and we would not have many of the break-throgh's in science if it was not for photography. Many images of what could be termed science photography are barely perceptable to us as images though and this is why these blueprints are interesting in their beauty and relationship to early science photography, many examples of which were executed as cyanotypes, which is also where we get the architectural blueprint from.

Melanie K's main site is also very nicely done and there are a lot of very interesting photo-experiments on there: http://www.melaniek.co.uk/work.htm

Here are a few images that her work made me think of...

Edward E. Barnard, Nine selected areas of the Milky Way photographed on a small scale, plate 51, 1927, Albumen print.

Emil Zettnow, Microrganism Plate X, c.1902, silver gelatin.

Henri Becquerel, Isolation of gamma radiation in Radium, after Paul Villard, 1903, gelatin silver print.

Becquerel conducted experiments to determine whether photography could detect invisible and dangerous rays. He wrapped uranium and potassium, etc in photographic paper and left them in a box in the dark so that no light could affect them. The photographic emulsion simulated the rays transmitted by the radioactive items transferring them onto the paper and resulting in such highly abstract images as above. Images that are virtually impossible to read as images and so confound our conventional understanding of how we read a photograph. Many of these experiments in photography are still used in detecting radiation even today in the use of small badges with photographic paper inside which, when tested, or developed, can tell whether a person has been over-exposed to radiation. Not as romantic as Becquerel's  early experiments but they've probably saved a few lives.

Frederick H. Evans, Spine of Echinus (Spine of a sea urchin), album page comparing three prints of spines of sea urchins, negative and silver prints made before 1886.

All of these images are taken from: Photography and Science, Kelley Wilder, Exposures series, Reaktion Books, 2009.

Robyn Hasty - Homeland

I am in love with Robyn Kelsy - let me tell you why. She is taking the History of Photography and of antiquated photographic practices and, refusing to be mired in History with it, she has completely bent it to her needs and to me that is truly inspiring.  Kelsy tours the United States visiting the homes and communities of people and organisations who refuse to accept the dominant ideology of existence in the West - that of Consumption and Commerce, or as she explains it:
"a Wet-Plate Collodion photo essay focusing on grassroots efforts to rebuild and re-envision life after the collapse of the American economy." 
In order to do this - and, as I understand it, with little technical knowledge in either analogue or digital photography - she has taken on a technology that, by definition, operates outside of the dominant commercial activity of photography and the result are extremely beautiful.

"The range of projects documented will include urban farms, bicycle collectives, off-the grid homes, alternative fuel producers, art and theatre collectives, community dinners, free schools and after-school programs, squats, itinerants, tent cities and many other grassroots social practices."

As I have been discovering myself, learning how to use wet-collodian is a time-sucking and (initially at least) costly venture but once you have mastered it, your supplies are minimal and you can keep on making pictures as freely as you have japanned metal and/or glass and colodion mix. I applaud Kelsy for taking this on and giving it a modern spin. I worry that too often photographers who take this on (including myself) are either too often mired in the past or they have no specific plans to apply the process to. Kelsy has been an inspiration to me in my plans for wet-colodian - If I ever find the time and money, I hope to start blogging my trials and tribulations in the 'black-fingered art'.

Mad props to Vignette Magazine for doing an article on her a few months ago (and for doing an entire issue of their *free* magazine devoted to alternative proccesses!) and introducing myself and the rest of the UK to Kelsy's work.

She has lots of lovely pictures on her kickstarter blog where she is raising funds for her travel and where you can read updates and see new images as well as lots of interesting images of her process and her portable darkroom, pictured below. Also check out her video for her Kickstarter project where she explains her project in better English than me is able.

...and here are some of Robyn's beautiful Tintypes on display in homemade frames at Kesting/Ray Gallery in New York City. I love the entirely homemade/found aspect of displaying them here.