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.

1850s 1/4 plate US Daguerreotype

Gorgeous Young Couple 1/4 Plate Daguerreotype, Crisp & Sharp, Outstanding Holographic Depth. Image is Housed in a Worn Full Brown Leatherette Case w/ Split Spine and Nice Red Velvet Pillow w/ Grecian Urn Motif.

Cass Tech: Now and Then:

Some awfully clever folks over at detroiturbex.com ("exploring and understanding the city of Detroit") have sought to document the city's social and economic collapse by creating this clever yet very affecting project where vintage photographs of a thriving Cass Tech College circa 1990s have been laid over modern digital photograph of the school in its current dilapidated state. Forty Three of these very poignant yet quite creepy images can be seen here:

http://detroiturbex.com/content/schools/cass/thenandnow/index.html

What I find especially amazing about this is just how perfectly they have managed to sync up the old pictures with the new ones. I've tried this myself and it is extremely hard. Methinks there may be technological jiggery-pokery involved here. Not that that is really a problem. I'd just love to know how they did it so well.

I had an interesting mini conversation with a friend about how images of Detroit's urban degradation (and the exploration of such places) is being used as "Ruin Porn" and directly ignoring the more real and far less romantic problem of the collapse of a social infrastructure. I think that while most romanticised images of ruins and ruined buildings (hey, photo-geeks have been getting off on images of ruined buildings since the dawn of Photography, look at Eugene Atget or the London Society for the Preservation of Ancient Buildings) ignore the social and economic realities of how they came to become ruined in the first place, I'm sure that the photographers of highlighting the issues here and not of simply exploiting the scenery. I think that these images pull off a double-whammy of being especially poignant, nostalgiac and romantic while at the same time adressing the very problems at hand through their arresting visual trickery.

Said friend also directed me towards a more light-hearted yet equally arresting and successful example of this current trend of laying-new-photos-over-old (or composite-photo-projects as they are more generally and more snappily titled) in the shape of these lovely images of New York Buildings and scenes seen in movie stills of the past:

http://www.theatlanticcities.com/arts-and-lifestyle/2013/01/hunting-movie-scenes-past-real-life-new-york/4294/

Mad props to Erin and Anne for the heads up.

In Rodinsky's Room.

"Rodinsky's main occupation appeared to have been writing. Just as his contemporaries had written in hidden rooms, sealed-off attics and underground bunkers all over Eastern Europe. While studying in Krakow I heard how archives were assembled in the Warsaw ghetto in milk cans, then sealed with lead before being buried, in the vain hope that they would survive as a record of their authors; existence. The lone printed boldly in the books I retrieved from the synagogue in Greatorex Street came to mind: FOR FUTURE REFERENCE. 

...In the ghettos, diaries were written on any book that could be found, in as many languages as possible - French, Yiddish, Russian... - and in an attic in East London, in a later but parallel time, David Rodinsky sat alone and wrote in Letts diaries, on ild newspapers, cigarette packets, in Greek, Hebrew, Chinese, Russian. Rodinsky would have been eighteen years old at the time of the ghetto uprising, slightly older than the average age of the rebel fighters. But he didn't bury his books, he didn't need to, he just locked the door and left a tomb without a body, maybe hoping someone in the future would find it and decode his tale. He shifted constantly in my mind from scholar to lunatic to hero."

From Rodinsky's Room by Rachel Lichtenstein and Iain Sinclair, London, Granta Books, 1999.

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Portrait of Rachel Lichtenstein by Marc Atkins, 1995

Kaminski Fall Photography Sale

This Beautiful 1/4 plate Dagerreotype of an Old Mill, possibly located in Herkimer, NY was just part of a huge sale of 200 seperate images of historic photography auctioned recently from a single 30 year collection from Rochester, New York at an Auction house in Beverly, Mass on Oct 3rd and 4th. Among other items were a  (self?) portrait of a Daguerreotypist with his kit  - unfortunatey not shown - as well as images of a beardless Abe Lincoln according to this article - though I thought there were only a handful of known Lincoln images to exist, surely these should be in a museum somewhere?

"A very rare outdoor view of President Abraham Lincoln, before the State House, at the Flag Raising, dated February 22, 1861, identified as 1029 Chestnut Street, Philadelphia by T. S. Hacker sold for $6250 while a second image, a rare period copy ¼ plate daguerreotype of Abraham Lincoln “beardless” sold for $1755"



Ghosts of the Civil Dead

Heartbreaking. This Ambrotype of a young girl was supposedly found between a dead Union and dead Confederate soldier after the battle of Fort Republic, Virginia during the American Civil War. The Museum of the Confederacy is seeking help in identifying the people in 8 photographs similarly found on battlefields. Sounds like the beginning of a great novel a la Cold Mountain. The girls in the Daguerreotype below could almost pass for Sally Mann's children. More details here.

The Narrative of a Life...

“Most lives vanish. A person dies, and little by little all traces of that life disappear. An inventor survives in his inventions, an architect survives in his buildings, but most people do not leave behind monuments or lasting achievements: a shelf of photograph albums, a fifth-grade report card, a bowling trophy, an ashtray filched from a Florida hotel Room on the final morning of some dimly remembered vacation. A few objects, a few documents, and a smattering of impressions made on other people. Those people invariably tell stories about the dead person, but more often than not dates are scrambled, facts are left out, and the truth becomes increasingly distorted, and when those people die in their turn, most of the stories vanish with them."

- Paul Auster, The Brooklyn Follies. p. 301

Photo-albums serve as a visual chapter of the life of the person who has most often compiled it. The Bearer, if you like. Like any good story, most have some kind of beginning and end but the best ones are the ones that frustrate the viewer/reader by being too open-ended. Too ambiguous in interpretation. More questions are left unanswered. They generally record happy times. Memories of a pleasant and/or meaningful period in a persons life - after all, nobody compiles a photo book to record the pain and suffering life brings - such as Holidays, Vacations, Birthdays, Bar Mitzvah’s and weddings. But as with life itself there are usually questions left unanswered and it is usually for these unanswerables that we are drawn to them as objects. We appreciate photo-albums for their time-capsule ability to pull us into a past once more. Albums from other countries as well as other times particularly have this draw to them. A strivation for normalcy must continue above all else.