15 October 2007

my beasts

I’m fighting with Salts and Silver still, trying to get the last prints for my show just right. Suddenly plagued by odd stains in the wash, I’ve tried Citric Acid, Distilled Water washes, Fixer changes, Paper changes, and so on and so on. I now figure the wash water has changed, since there was street work being done on the water mains last month. Perhaps the trace iron from rust is interacting with any left-over silver, or sulfides from fixing… maybe the PH of the water has changed enough to affect the wash. I don’t know, but it’s been making me crazy. I’ve moved to hand washes for ages (a lot more work) and a Secret Ingredient that helps the washes from beginning to end – Salt! Almost done now…

I did, however, escape the ongoing chemistry battles in the studio for a few hours the other day, and got myself stuck in the Early British Photography show at the Met. It’s a massive and beautiful show, with a lot more than the usual Talbots and Calvert Joneses I’ve seen (and loved) before…

Aside from the simple pleasure I got from looking at someone else’s Salt Prints for a change, I was amazed at how Modern the work looked. Granted, I’m someone who plays up the faults and mistakes of Early Photography, so I’ve always looked at these First Photographs from what I consider the yawning gap of 160 years or so. And yet so many of these photographs of the 1850’s presage so-called modernists of, say, 1950 and later.

John Muir Wood’s Boy by Open Door made me think of Ralph Eugene Meatyard, with its square format and carefully composed mystery (not to mention the three names!) I looked at Thomas Sutton’s Tower Struck by Lightning from 1854 and thought immediately of the Bechers installed in the Met’s new Contemporary Photography gallery nearby. And just look at the absolutely perfect composition of Calvert Richard Jones:

Of course, Composition (and Cameras!) had been around for centuries, but somehow one often gets the idea that the new medium of Photography grew slowly like a Child, where instead it was born Fully-Formed. Within the first few years, there were “modernists” of all kinds (along with Documentary & Commercial Photographers, Pornographers and Postmodernists...) In the 1850’s, it was all happening at once, and Impressed By Light tells the tale wonderfully.