"When Old Is New Again..."
"Altered Narratives" was conceived by local photographer
Christine Eadie.
An accomplished photographer, she also has been known locally as the Charleston Tin Typist for several years now.
She explored this 18th-century art form and then started creating her own, most notably at Civil War re-enactments.
Christine took a sample "old school" photo of me last year at The Battle of Charleston.
Recently, she converted a trailer into her portable darkroom to make wet plate tintypes on the spot, right next to the battlefield.
That's how they did it back in Mathew Brady's day as he and others pioneered pictorial coverage of the War Between The States with horse-drawn facilities for developing wet plate photos.
Anyway, her growing skill with tintypes encouraged her to contact 11 other like-minded artists and photographers.
This talented dozen presents its collective "old-is-new" effort March 19 - May 1, 2016, at the City Art Gallery, overlooking the pineapple fountain, at the newly-renamed Joe Riley Waterfront Park.
Here is a close-up portion of a carbon-transfer 25" x 31" framed print titled "Angel of Fisterra," by
Sandy King.
The city gallery is open and airy and well lighted for viewers of art.
However, taking a photo is a challenge because of the prints being framed with glass and there are multiple light reflections.
Most galleries do not allow photography so my preview look might be the exception.
I had a friend stand behind me to use him to block the reflected glare on "Metamorphosis."
But I started laughing when I saw the overall image his attempt made on the gallery wall.
I would have had him hold up a blanket if one had been handy.
The artists were there at this pre-opening event.
They answered questions about the media they used and detailed the many arduous steps involved. This was not a simple digital camera experience.
Just a listing of the mediums and techniques used is impressive: tintype, palladium, gum bichromate and ziatypes.
Add in hand-colored black and white art to help define the hands-on approach of crafting a photograph from start to finish.
I talked with a few others who had built darkrooms in their homes long ago.
We refreshed our memories of the chemical smells, eerie red and yellow lighting and the craft of moving images around to create some result we had only in our mind.
(Click on the photos and links for more details.)
Saw only one person there at the gallery, snapping pictures with a Smartphone camera.
And that was just a picture of Eadie, posing by her exhibit.
Here is a replacement copy for the one I snapped of her concept of "Crossing Over." This lighting is excellent and no glaring reflections!
Let me add, that this is a wet plate collodion on aluminum.
Be sure to stop by the City Gallery and see for yourself. All of these look much better there!
Labels: "Angel of Fisterra, Altered Narratives, gum bichromate, hand-colored photos, old-is-new, palladium, tintype, wet plate photos, ziatypes
When "Old" is "New" again....
Years ago, when I was young, married and living in San Diego, I drove a sporty car.
Not really designed for harsh weather, but a delight in usually sunny Southern California.
To romp in the snow, you had to make an effort.
A Sunday drive up to the nearby mountains to see snow. And ice and all that other horrible part of Winter.
But, back then, it was a fun jaunt into something different.
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Now, it's many years and many cars later.
I drive a proper sedan with roll-up windows and a good heater.
I'm back where I was born and remembering the cozy small photo darkroom I had set up at our house downtown in Ansonborough.
Being a high school photographer at Bishop England taught me many technical skills that still serve me well as an aging, retired camera-toter.
Oh, the cameras are much smaller now and it's digital instead of film...but hey, not always.
In fact, a person can pick up some great bargains in cameras and lenses like I grew up with.
Film cameras and equipment is languishing online as digital Nikon and Canon, Sony and Kodak SLRs (Single lens reflex) command top dollar.
Craigslist, eBay, and other online sites offer equipment that cost an arm and a leg in the past - when I was buying - and now are VERY affordable.
You don't even have to build your own photo lab.
"Learn Black and White in the Charleston Darkroom," is the headline on a flyer I just saw from CunningFox Photography Education.
Yep, a complete film processing and print making darkroom facility staffed by professionals and open to the public for reasonable rates.
I doubt that many remember when hubbub on the street would bring a mother and her children out to see a pony plodding along on the sidewalk.
Waiting to pose for a picture of the little one astride the noble steed!
Well, my brothers and I had our "riding picture" taken on the corner of Society and Meeting Streets.
I believe the itinerant pony wrangler provided the fancy chaps and kerchief and cocked my hat at a jaunty angle before he froze the fast-paced action with his camera.
Which brings up another point in these modern times.
Will our children have snapshots like these, available in albums, to pass around?
Will there be writing on the back to identify the who, what, when and where of the event pictured?
I am still finding albums overflowing with snapshots that my folks had (sometimes) tagged with identifications and pasted on the black pages of a photo binder.
But now, a picture is taken with a digital camera - or with a phone - and you see the image immediately on a small screen on the back of the camera or cell phone.
It may be posted on Facebook or on a variety of other online social media sites, but there is no print to stick in an album or stuff in a shoe box.
I miss not having a negative to protect and save in a glasine envelope. for future reprints.
Oh, we have digital back-ups and cloud storage but is any of this as permanent as a photo in an album?
Already we have seen "storage" of images on floppy disks and on video tapes.
But can they be retrieved and showed again. Uh, no, the equipment is no longer available.
In music recordings, we passed from 78 records to vinyl playback machines to 8-track, to cassettes and CDs and now you pay 99 cents for the one song you like instead of $15- $20 for an CD or LP album with 12 songs.
I think this Charleston Darkroom concept is a good one. Making a tangible product you can have in your hand.
Something to keep and pass along to others.
I found a tintype photo of my father's mother when she was a baby. It was tucked into the back of an album I was looking through. It was taken in 1895.
I can hold it out to show it to others.
And I do.
(Click on the photos if you like black & white.)
This is the way it used to be done.
Labels: 78rpm, cassette tapes, Charleston Darkroom, Craigslist, CunningFox Photography Education, eBay, LP album, tintype, VCR DVD combo
Learned something new, er, I mean, old.
This is NOT an old photograph called a tintype.
It was NOT taken on a "wet glass plate" using the
colloidal process.
It was taken in a studio in a mall about 20 years ago in Minneapolis the one year I lived in a VERY cold climate. I'm not as dumb as I look - I accepted the first job I was offered in Florida.
They asked if I wanted to come down and visit and I said it was not necessary. I accepted the job because it was in Florida...not Minnesota.
But, I digress.
At the December 10 meeting of my Photography Group, we saw a presentation by Christine Eadie, a legal secretary who calls her old timey process company
Charleston Tintypist.
Get it? She's a typist and makes tintype photos on metal. The same process used during the Civil War.
Or, as it is called here, the
"Recent Unpleasantness."
Back in the 1860s, if you wanted to make a large photo, it required a large camera.
This is an 8 x 10 bellows camera that used a wet plate that size. This is a much newer model but the lens is quite old.
Christine explained the step-by-step process and then told how she packs up all her accessories and goes into the field at local battle Re-enactments.
She reasoned these costumed participants would appreciate the authenticity of having their photo taken this way.
She said that has worked well so far.
But they also expected all of her equipment to be the Real McCoy too.
Short of building a mule-drawn portable darkroom wagon, she works on a much smaller scale.
The process (see the link) does involve some caustic chemicals and she wears modern protective safety glasses and takes other steps to avoid injury.
She told us that the "fixer" that stabilizes the image on the wet glass is Potassium Cyanide.
Yeah, pretty dangerous stuff that can blind you if it splashes into your eyes. Same with Silver Halide crystals.
That happened to the famed photographer
Mathew Brady, while he covered the aftermath of Civil War battles.
Christine said many of the photos we attribute to Brady were taken by his many assistants after his vision was impaired.
The real beauty of these tintypes, preserved on thin sheets of iron, is they are "varnished" at the end and exist in fine shape even after 150 years.
With today's dependence on digital, one could not be assured that images would be available after changes in software!
Christine brought half a dozen of her finished products as part of her presentation.
We photographers had many questions and foremost was the length of exposure on this "slow speed" medium.
She said an exposure of 3-10 seconds often was required.
Illustrations of various clamps and devices were shown that were used to hold the subject's head steady.
Any movement would cause a blur.
Other contraptions were clamped to hold a subject's body in place during the exposure to avoid such blurring.
I asked if she had experimented with using a modern flash and she said she had.
I commented that photographers during that period who used flash powder probably could be recognized because they lacked eyebrows.
Laughter ensued.
(Click on the photos for more details.)
The links I added will give you more background on the topic and I am sure Christine would be willing and able to answer your questions.
I see flash powder being used in photos taken in the 1920s and later.
Well, I used flashbulbs when I started out. Anyone remember those?
Now my camera has a built-in strobe light that flashes at 1/2000th of a second.
Yikes.
Labels: Charleston Tin-typist., Collodion process emulsion, fixer, flash powder, gelatin, Mathew B. Brady, silver halide crystals, tintype, varnishing, wet plate photography
Christine took a sample "old school" photo of me last year at The Battle of Charleston.
Most galleries do not allow photography so my preview look might be the exception.
Just a listing of the mediums and techniques used is impressive: tintype, palladium, gum bichromate and ziatypes.
