Contemporary Vintage Photography

About

As digital cameras made sharp, clean pictures effortless, a number of photographers turned back to nineteenth-century chemistry. The wet-plate collodion process, introduced in the 1850s, means coating a glass or metal plate, then exposing and developing it before it dries, and it leaves pours, streaks and swirls at the edges. Sally Mann used it for the landscapes of Deep South and the studies of What Remains, welcoming its accidents. John Dugdale, who lost most of his sight in the 1990s, makes cyanotypes with a gentle Victorian air.

Others revisit old kinds of picture rather than old chemistry. Takashi Arai makes daguerreotypes, one-off images on silvered plates, of places and objects marked by nuclear history. Waswo X. Waswo works with Indian studio photographers and hand-colourists to revive the painted studio portrait, and Pushpamala N. restages popular images of Indian womanhood as photo-performances. Throughout, clarity gives way to texture and tone.