Stephen Berkman

I work with the wet collodion process. You can either make a Tintype or you can do a glass plate negative or you can make an Ambrotype. So the majority of my photographs are Ambrotypes. But I’ve also ventured into other processes as well. For example I’ve also made Calotype negatives and Kosher Salt prints.

No, it’s all natural. Basically what you’re doing is sensitizing the plate, exposing the plate and then developing the plate right there on the spot. That process dates to about 1851.

I started learning the process in 1997. But my interest actually dates back quite a bit earlier to 1995 when I joined a Daguerreian Society in hopes of learning the Daguerreotype process. I wanted to learn how to make Daguerreotypes. As I started investigating further, I stumbled upon the wet collodion process and realized that was much more suitable for my vision. My main interest was the notion that I could take this old process and turn it to my own end and possibly subvert it a little bit. Then I would use the 19th century as a template to work off of. I feel like I’m working in the 19th century photographic idiom.

When I was a teenager, I was doing a lot of photojournalism. There was a directness and an immediacy to it that I liked. From there I decided I really was more interested in filmmaking because I wanted to expand the frame. Then it came full circle and I realized that there was a lot more power in a single frame. I’m interested in the narrative of a singular image that will provoke the viewer into thinking about what occurred just prior to the exposure being taken and of what happened after the exposure. I think there is always an unanswerable mystery underlying a great photograph.

Generally I see it as an implied narrative. I see my photographs as analagous to fragmented frames from films, films that were probably lost, destroyed or perhaps never made it to nitrate to begin with.

That also dates back to the time I was about 16. I probably didn’t even know the term Daguerreotype at that point, but I had the thought that it would be great to revive this process. I had no idea if anyone had done it since the 1800’s. So it was something I was really quite serious about, but I didn’t fully investigate it because my interest in filmmaking started to overtake my still photographic pursuits. So when I came back around to doing still photography again in the 1990’s and realized that instead of doing 35mm style photography like I had when I was a teenager, I instead wanted to work with an 8x10 view camera and set up the shot and be very specific about how I framed something and place people in the frame as you would with a film. So I would be working as a film director, but now with the still camera.

To me it seems much more akin to the folk music tradition where you build upon older songs and then alter them with your own slant, but at the same time you have this great resonance of history on your side. Also technique wise, I feel we have a collective –inert memory of time as depicted through subtle visual cues. To be more specific, you always tend to evaluate periods of history through film emulsion – and visual artifacts. Take for example: most people tend to see World War II as a black and white experience. Particularly if you didn’t experience it directly. I recall well the shock the first time I saw images of the war in saturated kodachrome color. In that same way, we tend to view the 19th century through Daguerreotypes, Ambrotypes, and Albumen prints. I feel that I’m taking that dense tradition and filling in the missing blanks of the 19th century with things that might have happened, or perhaps should have happened, but for some cruel turn of history were not recorded or preserved in the sarcophagus of photographic history.

I think there was that element and I actually felt that it was the better instrument for my type of mind. I liked the digressive quality that you could achieve with still photography. To me it was much more like poetry, poetic logic if you will. Whereas film is much more like theater. You really need to stay on track in a film project. With photography, you can jump around and still keep the thematic ideas in line, like a chorus that you keep returning to in a folksong. I’m interested in the mystical and esoteric quality of the wet collodion process. I started out more general in terms of working with the camera then I got more and more specific in as my vision sharpened.

The time exposure really varies. Sometimes it can be as short as a few seconds or I’ve had some exposures that are about a minute or more. It depends on a number of factors. It depends on your chemistry. It depends upon the amount of light that there is. It depends upon the size of the plate from how far the light has to travel from the lens to the plate. It also depends upon if you’re using a waterhouse-stop, an aperture, or not. There are a lot of different factors that go into the consideration of the exposure. What’s interesting is that in most photography you use a light meter to evaluate what your exposure should be. In this photographing system, you have to shoot a test plate and then determine the exposure time. I really like the organic nature of working with the process and being able to see what I’m doing as I do it and then make subtle variations or adjustments.

I’m using a view camera with lenses from the 1860’s. I’m always thinking, “What has this lens seen before I started working with it?” It is very much akin to playing a guitar from the 20’s or 30’s and the instrument already having memory.

I think it’s more in terms of changing the context. I certainly feel that if you were simply just to mimic 19th century photographs, that wouldn’t be enough because the work from that era is already so profound and phenomenal. I feel that I need to shift it to some degree and put my mark on it. I’m working at this time in history so I’m the beneficiary or victim of history up to this point and that goes into my work as well.

Yeah. I just found a terrific 1870’s camera stand, which I’m quite excited about it. I’m always on the lookout for other 19th century lenses and other pieces of apparatus that can become part of my installations, but I always feel that if I don’t produce work then I’m just a collector of the equipment.

Some are documented on my website. There is the “Obscura Object”, which is a camera obscura in the form of a woman in a 19th century hoop skirt. A tent obsura prism lens acts as her head and projects an image through the prism inside of the hoop. Ultimately, It wasn’t enough for me to go back into the 1850’s in terms of photography because I was interested in tracing the roots of photography back much further. It is easy to come to the conclusion that photography was very late in coming. Particularly when you take into consideration that lenses were being used with camera obscuras by the mid 1500s. Unfortunately, it took a long time to chemically produce an image. I think in order for somebody to successfully figure out the varied combinations of chemicals and specific mixtures, amounted to what I would consider a Rubik's Cube of serendipity. So I’m very interested in the era of pre-chemical photography where photography existed, but all you could do was produce an ephemeral image. You couldn’t actually transfer that image.

Just before the turn of this century we now find ourselves in. It happened more by happenstance, than grand design. The genesis of the project I previously mentioned – “Obscura Object came seemingly, without warning. I came up with this notion of building upon the conception of the tent obscura, which was originally a camera obscura in the form of a small tent, with a lens at the top, that was utilized by artists traveling out in the field. The projected image from the lens enabled them to make very accurate tracings of the landscape. I thought, it would be more interesting if you had the lens as a woman’s head, and the tent would actually be the woman’s hoop skirt dress.” One would climb under the woman’s hoop dress in order to view the projected image inside the bell hoop of the dress.

So it started with that project and then continued from there. I hadn’t planned on doing installation art, but I like the way in which the three-dimensional forms interact with the photographs, ultimately expanding their meaning. I’m interested in creating a cosmology of work. Moreover, I feel that the camera obscura installations instill a sense of mystery and awe that one experiences when you encounter the projection of an ephemeral image. In addition, I’m quite fascinated by projecting images, which refer back to the magic lantern. One of my projecting installations, the “Quadrascope” consists of four lenses, each facing in a North, South, East, West direction. A white Luna moth occupies the center of the four lenses. A spotlight focused on the Luna moth projects the image of the moth through all four lenses, onto a four sided semi-translucent screen material a short distance away. So in essence, you’re actually inside of a giant camera. The screen material is where you would place your film. Eventually I intend to do the installation with live crickets to provide a living soundtrack.

In another installation, “Looking Glass” which is a transparent glass camera, you’re able to witness the inner workings of an image. The camera is focused on a well illuminated Cro-Magnon skull on a stand, which projects onto the back plate of the glass camera. The all glass construction enables one to look inside of a camera and see the image being formed. You realize just how primitive photography is – you’re able to observe firsthand the collision of light and optics. This project developed out of the notion that photography was perhaps too mysterious, too secretive, so I wanted to, quite literally open it up, make it more transparent and more democratic. By making the camera transparent, you can actually see the process at work. Ordinarily, in order to obtain an image, it has to be completely dark inside the camera, otherwise the film is exposed to light and ruined. I like the idea that the glass camera runs completely contrary to the history of the camera and photography. In fact, it is perhaps unlikely that when Johannnes Kepler notably termed the phenomena of receiving visible images through a lens – a camera obscura [which literally translates as dark room] in his 1604 treaties “Ad Vitellionmen Paralipomena” that he could have envisioned 401 years later the emergence of a transparent glass camera.

That actually occurred through a circuitous route. Walter Murch, who was the editor of the film referred me to Cold Mountain writer/director Anthony Minghella. I met with Minghella in London, showed him my work and it went from there. As it turned out, he needed to have tintype of Jude Law and Nicole Kidman in the first scene of the film. I also made tintypes for a film called “The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford”. I really enjoy doing photographs for films specifically because I like working with the actors when they’re in character. They’re very enthusiastic and they’re really terrific at improvisation. In a way, I feel it’s an extension of what I already do.

I’m working on a book called Between Two Worlds, which will be a combination of my photographs and installations.

I was born in Syracuse, New York, but I grew up primarily in the Bay Area near San Francisco.

Yeah, in my mind I considered myself a serious photographer at the age of 12.

At that time it was mainly just documenting the world around me. I guess now I’m documenting my mind, but back then I was photographing everything I would see that interested me. Even at that time my interests ran to the things few others were aware of, or probably even cared about, such as early films. I can recall discovering a large cache of 16mm silent film prints. I was so excited by this discovery that in the seventh or eighth grade I ran for student body president on the political platform to project silent films at lunchtime. Of course I lost. That was the end of my political career.

by Daniel Robert Epstein

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