Koussevitzky Art Gallery

I have always been interested in early glass plate photographs for their ability to be so far distant in time and still so immediate in expression. We all have seen those piles of ancient little black-and-white photographs for sale in antique stores; "instant relatives" they are sometimes labeled. They were usually mounted on cards embossed with florid text advertising the photographer's studio, and of a size limited by the plate that would fit in the camera with which it was made.

Until the early 20th century and the invention of faster gelatin emulsion, enlargements were next to impossible. The negatives from which these images were made would not be expected to be viewed larger than their original sizes- mostly 4x5', 5x7' or 8x10'.

By enlarging them, many otherwise invisible photographic details can be seen. But more than that, one can identify so much of the way that negatives would have been manipulated by the photographer for clarity or to enhance their explication of the scene — their Art.

And I figure as long as I am going to this extent to make these negatives do something that was never the original intention, I could photograph their surfaces to see what stories that would reveal about the photographer the sitter and magic image for which there never really was a definitive truth.

The black and white images were made in a darkroom with traditional wet processing. The color images were made with a digital camera which registered the colors of tarnished emulsion and allowed me to reformat the negatives to their original aspect ratios.