Early camerawork rediscovered at NHIA

By Felicia Menard
HippoPress.com

While lots of the photographers in the annual exhibition of the New Hampshire Society of Photographic Artists at the New Hampshire Institute of Art use digital technology, many resurrect more low-tech, antique processes.

Jay Goldsmith captured four small landscape vignettes of Paris using a pinhole camera, an inexpensive and very old technique. The pinhole camera is based on the camera obscura of the 16th century. The theory is simple. If one puts a hole in a container, light will be squeezed through the hole onto the film or paper, creating a small aperture.
"The process gives an unlimited depth of field from inches to infinity," said Mike Ariel, one of the photographers in the show. "The tradeoff is you sacrifice just a little bit of sharpness with this technique."

This tradeoffs are not at all apparent in Goldsmith's work. His landscapes of Paris are sharp, romantic and beautiful.
Moving forward a few hundred years, Barbara Henes captures a romantic, heartbreaking image of a butterfly in the almost-lost 19th century process of bromoil. The butterfly has the softest gray gossamer wings. The image is flat like a Japanese print.

"Lots of people are galloping toward the future in photography, but I'm running backwards," Henes said. The bromoil process is long and involved. The first step is to take a black and white photo and bleach it. The image is resoaked and a stiff oil pigment is applied using a stag foot brush. The stag foot brush also is known as a deer foot stippler (named for what it looks like and what it does). At this stage, the artist can control the colored ink or pigment. During the process, the gelatin in the paper actually swells proportional to the amount of silver that remains in the image.

"It's based on the old adage, oil and water don't mix," said Henes. The dark areas in the image swell slightly and absorb lots of ink. The light areas in the image swell a lot, which repels the ink.

Using new technology, Bev Conway uses a Holga camera to achieve her surreal image entitled "Chaco." A Holga is a camera with a plastic lens that can be purchased for under $20. It uses a medium format film, which produces a large negative. The plastic lens throws the image slightly out of focus toward its edges.

Conway scanned the resulting print, enlarged it and printed it as an archival ink jet print. Conway's image reads as a child's model of a New Mexico pueblo. The soft beige color deepens to a terra-cotta hue. The resulting photograph is haunting, brilliant and chilling.

The Annual Exhibition of the New Hampshire Society of Photographic Artists runs through Feb. 28 at the New Hampshire Institute of Art, Fuller Hall Gallery, 156 Hanover St.

Felicia Menard can be reached at hippo@hippopress.com