Photographic Evidence

Although digital photography makes it easier and faster than ever to create clean, commercialized photographs, many fine art photographers continue to use non-digital photographic processes in their work. In fact, many are even uniting digital and non-digital processes to create more dynamic images than ever before thought possible.

Ironically, like many other “antique” art forms, non-digital photography seems to be valued by artists for the same reasons many commercial photographers are discarding it in favor of its digitized cousin—it’s often slow, difficult, and highly error-prone, as photographer Sally Mann illustrates to in this video of her using the wet-plate collodion process in an 8x10 camera (a-la US Civil War era photography):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o62-YMQHeoI

Tintypes made portraits relatively inexpensive in the 19th century, and today, many artists are using the process to create unique, eerie portraits once again, despite the apparent difficulty of the process. Here are some examples by contemporary artists who are going back to the tintype process:

http://www.andersonstaley.com/users/KeliyAndersonStaley4060/images/KeliyAndersonStaley4060415411.jpg
Keliy Anderson Staley

http://rainsong.weblog.com.pt/fotos/BlackWinged.jpg

Jayne Hinds Bidaut

Here is an example of some of my own work with "outdated" photographic processes:

https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiCj28ErwuGK93bm5C-66Y3L0bnY7DUHX8KZ4jKFsvxIYufdJZ0dTBf2fbFyb16K8G-LJNqK4j2wQXHemRdphz-mDZdr4I1oUXmUms7eZFKuVWGAppvTqYxnvUgfB82ruNd0iYGWzMS3lc/s1600-h/facetint1.jpg

A self portrait taken with a 4x5 camera and hand tinted after being printed "the old fashioned way" in a wet darkroom.

So, why is it, then, that so many photographers continue to use these "outdated" processes in their work? Although these processes take longer and can be considerably more labor-intensive than creating digital photographs, it's obvious that their results are very different from digital photographic processes. The aesthetic of a tintype or hand-tinted silver gelatin print is vastly different from that of an inkjet print from a digital file. While some photographers may be trying to capture an image that looks like its from the past, others are photographing distinctly contemporary subjects with distinctly antique processes. Such a combination may be a way for photographers to set themselves apart and create unique work.

Check out these links for more interesting photographic processes:

Photogravure
Alternative Photography.com