Aspen Hochhalter

Aspen Hochhalter is an Associate Professor of Art and the Photography Area Coordinator in the Department of Art and Art History at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. Her work has been exhibited nationally and examines contemporary photographic themes as well as the crossover between digital technology and historic photographic processes.

Artist Statement: The 92/20 Self-portrait Series 

92/20 is a collection of 92 wet plate collodion ambrotype self-portraits created in 20 days during the summer of 2011. These very personal self-portraits speak to the construction and deconstruction of feminine identity. It was also an experiment in returning to not only the roots of photographic expression by utilizing one of the earliest photographic processes, but also a return to the bare essentials of photographing: a reliance on self, silver and the sun. Yet, since wet plate collodions have to be coated, exposed and developed in a matter of minutes--all while the light sensitive photographic emulsion is still wet - this nineteenth century process has an intriguing parallel to the instant gratification of our current digital age.

The images themselves are elusive sketches of a “self,” playing to the camera, flowing in and out of poses and clichés--juxtaposed with unexpected flaws, irregularities, missing pieces and unsettling cuts and tears. I revel in the mistakes, the odd textures and unexpected chemical smears and veils that emerge on the photograph--most of which serendipitously occur over an eye or mouth--chance deletions and desecrations of the form that create an intense emotional content for which I couldn’t have planned. With the 92 plates, I am now reconstructing what I deconstructed and fragmented with the camera, creating odd approximations of a whole. A sometimes unsettling reconstruction of self emerges: dismantled, fragmented and then stitched back together.

Brett Henrikson

"My name is Brett Henrikson, and I’m an Artist-Photographer… artist being the most important part. Photographic processes are my hammer and chisel, as I approach the world and use visual language to understand and reinterpret being. My bodies of work vary from work about intersection of life and death, classical portraiture and nudes using the wet plate collodion process, and using the physicality of the photographic object in a new and unconventional way. I am based strongly in the craft and alchemy of the process. I believe that the hands on aspects of working in the darkroom and using film or large format gives the artist a real sense of creation over their work. That being said, I live in Pawtucket and work at my studio in Central Falls in an old mill above a loading dock, where I can blast vinyl symphonies while making prints in the red warm confines of my womb like darkroom."

Artist Statement: Chaotic Forms 

I go deep into the imagination. Skin becomes metallic, and the slow nature of working in the darkroom takes on a meditative quality. I aim for the images to take on the same meditative state that the process offers me in the darkroom, a quiet intimacy, a dark beauty. Collodion is pure; it’s like having a bon fire and taking the ashes of burned branches and drawing on the sides of a cave. Some might draw running horses or portraits of man. I let the light from the fire guide my sense of mysticism into somewhere new that only exists in the ether, on the shimmering light from my darkroom trays and from behind my eyes. Now when more work is done behind the computer, working with my hands in the dark, I am without rules or limitations, and the medium is free.

Brenton Hamilton

Brenton Hamilton is a artist working in Maine and leading courses at Maine Media Workshops where he has taught for over two decades. Brenton is a photography historian and a practicing artist in several media. He was educated at Savannah College of Art and Design, MFA 1992.

Hamilton has led classes at Maine Media Workshops for 22 years and his specialty areas include the history of photography, B&W darkroom craft and the historic processes. Brenton lectures widely both in Maine and nationally about contemporary issues in photography, its history and other subject area interests within the medium and contemporary trends. He is also on the adjunct faculty at The Center of Alternative Processes in New York City. Brenton is a contributing writer and president of Obscura, founded in 2009, a non profit organization devoted to the progress of youth education in photography and books.

His work is represented at TILT Gallery in Scottsdale, Arizona and in Maine at Susan Maasch Fine Art. Hamilton’s photographs are held in permanent collections at the Farnsworth Museum of Art, Portland Museum of Art, University of New England Permanent Collection and many significant private collections nationally. His first monograph was published by Obscura Press in 2010: The Blue Poet Dreams.

Statement 

Drawn to concepts of time and invention - Brenton builds small meta worlds to contemplate and experience. Via still life and collage; intimate spaces where time is suspended and rearranged is the manner in which Hamilton re jiggers the world and makes a private space for his viewers. Employing often the strange deep blue depth of the cyanotype or recently the odd spectrum of collodion on black glass. Hamilton's new and old worlds collide inviting the viewer to new possibilities.

Ashley Kauschinger: Let’s begin by having you tell us a bit about yourself, and your passions.

Brenton Hamilton: I am a Maine artist and now live and work here - I also grew up here spending alot of my early boyhood on an island with my parents. Which was influential - and a particular way to grow up. Without phones, electricity only for certain times of the day, we had rythems of movement - we didn't have a car for a long time for example. The horizon - which any island person would agree is a destination, everything was always: "over there". So, the horizon line was something that I looked at in early work that I did with the large camera in Georgia.

My own interests are a deep study of history which is a large influence upon my work so I may be drawn to books and archives - o.k. full disclosure I am !! American and European cultural history and of course art & photography have great stories that sustain me.......I have a large collection of primarily 18th C. Spanish antiques and I photograph the objects among other things. I find the objects magical and full of animation and and mysterious gesture. Many of those images are here in our interview. The antiques and my creative work merge. Fencing is also a passion - that's sword work. I fence foil & sabre. Ive studied the history of the practice of dueling with some depth.

How does a body of work come together for you, from start to finish?

The research that I do about culture and the objects that I'm drawn to have a wonderful rapport together. I get ideas from the research - I want to respond and invent that atmosphere. So, via collage and cyanotype or lately still life practice and these small set ups that I build, I make these things for the camera. Its a fantasy of course, an invention. I build something - and photograph it.

What environment do you create for yourself in your studio?

The rooms that I work in are a ramshackle tumble of books and papers, notes with ideas and things that I want to remember and also light. The room has great light. The objects are on pedestals, stacks of carpets and lean against one another. Creating moments of chance and interesting configurations. I also know that I don't work constantly. Things build up and then I have to make them and do my camera practice and printmaking.

How do you think about marrying form and content in your work?

I have always been drawn to the expressive potential of the 19th C historic processes - because of patina (paper surface) and the physical work involved in the making of the images. The black glass ambrotytpes and the collodion process has the physicality to it that I enjoy and feel "involved" in when doing it. The black ground of glass support is for the image to rise out of and is also exhilarating. That's actually similar to my years with cyanotype - a deep blue ground was a 'space' for my story to be told - and the image or figure would rise out of the deep color......it still gets me every time.

Who are your Photo Heroes?

Oh, that's a tough one for a historian, Ashley......Wm. Talbot and the French calotypists, Anna Atkins - But I also respond to and admire so much contemporary work right now such as Alison Rossiter, Matthew Brandt and especially Mariah Robertson. The materiality of photographs - and things that are light sensitive.

How does participating in sharing your knowledge through teaching contribute to your work? 

I love the classroom - its dynamic and its often challenging. Its a huge influence - and I get to talk about others work but its reciprocal because were doing the same thing/the same mission. That is: moving work and ideas forward.

Do you feel it inspires you? 

It really does......

Tell us about your participation with Obscura, a non-profit organization that
supports the arts and arts education through publishing, scholarships, and grants.

This is a great small org. - with a terrific mission. To assist youth with creative experiences in the medium, to publish good work in book form or in essay form on our web site. So, we work on raising funds via book sales and direct reach, give scholarships or materials support.

What initiatives are you working on? What is the best way for the photo community to help?

Our aim this year is another student scholarship for a short workshop experience in photography. It is a non profit - so we need to build the treasury to help these kids out. So, get in touch, donate if you can - everything matters even a little. The book purchases go directly to the work we do. But we also love good work and like to publish serious essays on the medium on our site. We published "Black Apple" by Thatcher Cook a while back and its doing well. We are all very proud of the book and our work.

How do you find balance between your artist practice, teaching and being the
president of Obscura?

Good question - its all the same though - participating in photography in a myriad of ways gets me to work everyday ! Helping young students, sustaining my own art practice and gallery work and the energy of the classroom all make a difference in my life.

Judy Sherrod & S. Gayle Stevens

One year ago, Judy Sherrod and S. Gayle Stevens embarked on a new adventure, a collaboration entitled Nocturnes, born of the gulf in Pass Christian Mississippi. Stevens a wet plate collodion artist and Sherrod a pinhole camera maker joined together to create something not done before mammoth plate pinhole wet plate tintypes. They have been very successful at it. Their collaboration has yielded publication in South by Southeast magazine, Lenscratch, and will be included in the next edition of Christopher James, The Book of Alternative Photographic Processes. Over the course of a year the duet shot 49, twenty by twenty inch pinhole tintypes of the gulf.

View more of their work here 

Ashley Kauschinger: Can you talk a bit about how your collaboration, and the series Nocturnes, began?

Judy Sherrod: It was a fluke. An experiment. I was too stupid to know that “it couldn’t be done” – large and ultra-large pinhole wet-plate. Gayle was making small works. It was something we agreed to try “just because.” We were elated by the initial results – 11x14 plates. We were also overwhelmed by the nature of the emulsion and how it rendered the image. So we went to 20x20s because that’s the size trays we had at the time, 20x24. My job was to make the camera. Gayle is the wet-plate collodion expert.

S. Gayle Stevens: Well I think it started over a bottle of Prosecco as most things with me and Judy start or end with a bottle of Prosecco. I shoot a lot in Pass Christian, MS. I did a series on pass after Katrina so I am drawn to the area and I have a darkroom there underneath Helen Davis house, a watercolor artist whose family lives in the pass. I am from the Chicago area, and Judy is from Texas, so Mississippi is our halfway point. Judy builds pinhole cameras and shoots film mostly. She is a great camera maker. Judy wanted to come out to shoot some wet plate. She asked what was the largest wet plate pinhole. I wasn’t sure but was pretty positive no one had shot a mammoth plate pinhole so we decided we would. I like square format so I recommended 20x20. For Nocturnes, I am drawn to the water so the first shot we did was of the gulf. We tried the land but my gut instinct was that this should be a series on the gulf. We discussed over Prosecco, and Nocturnes was born. 

AK: How is working with another photographer? Ever too many cooks in the kitchen? Is it liberating?

JS: Gayle has her expertise and I have mine. So we stay out of each other’s “stews.” But when there are problems, and there always are, we work together to figure out solutions. Any and all ideas are potential solutions, so any and all ideas are good. I find the collaboration liberating. Two heads are better than one. Four eyes are better than two. And we need all four hands.

What makes it most liberating is having two creative resources. And there’s a synergy to that, where one plus one equals three or more. We have worked hard to finish this first project – the first fifty plates. Now we have some opportunities to expand the project and try the things we’ve been adding to the to-do list. This is where we get to go a little crazy.

SGS: It’s really good and it's different. She pushes me to go in directions I might not have gone. As far as photography is concerned size is not important to me, so I might not have ventured into mammoth plates, as it does create a lot of problems. I think it strengthens me as an artist. We have play days and days when we each just work on our own, then we usually meet up for cocktails and a nice meal to discuss the plates and what we want to do next. Liberating... I never really thought about that but yeah someone to bounce things off of and someone who can share the workload so it's not all on one back, so yes.

AK: In the series statement, you speak about music as well as landscape surveying. How do you think about creating a poetic landscape?

JS: I look at the beauty that is rendered by the plate and by Gayle’s exposure. It’s not what I see when I Iook at the water. It IS like a musical composition. We have these elements, these variables. And they are assembled to create the image. There is a libretto also, somewhat. We are the libretto. We have words we use to describe the images to ourselves. Now that you have brought that to mind, I may start recording the words. Making the accompanying libretto. It is certainly expressive, and perhaps that makes it poetic.

SGS: I think the sea does that. In the waters is the beauty, the music, the poetry written in the sands, the lyrical voice of the waves, I am mesmerized. I walk, I watch pelicans glide above the waves, the sun glisten on the water, the waves breaking, and the gulls add staccato notes to the song...

Keats said it better: 

Feast them upon the wideness of the Sea; 

        Oh ye! whose ears are dinned with uproar rude, 

    Or fed too much with cloying melody--- 

        Sit ye near some old Cavern's Mouth and brood, 

Until ye start, as if the sea nymphs quired! 

AK: How does promoting the work differ in a collaborative team? What is this process like?

JS: Scattered like cats. It takes both of us. We both look for opportunities. We both have methods of presentation, and we have different ways of describing the project. We had to arm wrestle when writing the statement. That is why we are answering separately here. We each bring our own experiences to the collaboration and that is what makes it special. We’re not cut from the same mold. Different experiences, different traditions, different values, different gifts.

I could not be more fortunate.

SGS: We both just look at what is going on and write/text back and forth what do you think about this one ... here is a juror I’d like to see our work or here is a publication I think we should be in. Whoever is less busy at the time will take care of entries, submissions and sending out work to galleries and such… We don't have set rules. But Judy is the marketing smarts.

Galina Kurlat

Galina Kurlat was born in Moscow in 1981 and emigrated to the United States shortly after the fall of communism in 1989. She received her Bachelor of Media Arts Degree from Pratt in 2005. Her work has been exhibited internationally and is in a number of private collections. She currently lives and works in Houston, TX.

View more of Galina's work here: http://www.galinakurlat.com/

Ashley Kauschinger: In your series, Inherent Traits, your self portraits often look like they are of your sisters or cousins that you share traits with but are somehow not always you. What are you thoughts about this, and what themes or ideas is the fuel of this series?

Galina Kurlat:  The self-portrait project came as a direct reaction to my work with scars. I felt that I was asking a lot of my subjects in showing me their most vulnerable physical attributes and I wanted to see how that same process could be applied to making images of myself. I find that the small variations in expression, gesture and posture become significant. Still, most people are surprised to find out it is me in all of the photographs.

Some of the images are hard to look at now, but at the time they were very therapeutic.

AK: How do you think your exploration of alternative processes has evolved over time and what do you feel alt processes brings conceptually into your work?

GK: I hope that by using the collodion process I force an honest approach to the often-deceptive practice of self-portraiture.The most difficult part of working in such a recognizable photographic process is to allow the process to become part of the image without overwhelming it. It cannot not be an excuse for an image not being compelling. This continuous reflection on the medium has forced me to use a variety of techniques including; traditional color photography, Polaroid P/N film, Polaroid color film, salt prints, and wet collodion.

AK: Moving to a new place can be inspiring. Can you speak about your series, Reclamation, and how this work formed when you moved from Brooklyn to Houston, Texas? 

GK: I moved to Houston in the December of '08, the winter months here tend to be overcast, which is my favorite kind of light for outdoor work. My eyes were fresh to the new landscape and I found an endless fascination with the vast abandoned spaces mostly in the industrial East End.

Initially it was the buildings of the East End that attracted me to that neighborhood, their monolithic stature and seeming indestructibility. The integration of man-made structures with the slow tenuous forces of nature is evident. Time, entropy and memory are themes, which I continue to return to in my work.

AK: What is your process of self-promotion? How do you create a balance of making work and promoting it?

GK: I am still surprised by how much of my time is spent on the computer updating my website, entering competitions, answering emails and applying for grants. For me there is no formula to how much time and energy is spent on self-promotion. I think it's important to do a little at a time, while being consistent.