Slog

News & Arts

Line Out

Music & the City
at Night

« What Are We Going to Do on Wednesda… | Also, too, Atheists, Adulterers, Je… »

Tuesday, January 17, 2012

Visual Art Currently Hanging: Photography, Past and Present Tense

Posted by Jen Graves on Tue, Jan 17, 2012 at 9:02 AM

Robb Kendrick, Beau & Rowdy Hall, Lazy M8 Ranch, Colorado, 2007

Robb Kendrick, Beau & Rowdy Hall, Lazy M8 Ranch, Colorado, 2007

The Darkroom Series, at Zeitgeist Coffee, is pictures taken on mobile devices. "The easy access," Boohi Bronson writes, "makes for capturing every stupid beautiful little thing." Bronson is a member of Juxt, the Seattle "mobile arts community" that organized the Series—Juxt was founded to explore the possibilities of making art while moving, speed being a source of chance. Written profiles of members extol the democracy of the form: busy mothers becoming practicing photographers, for instance.

It's curious that most of the photographs on display are street pictures, taken in public or exterior places. For all the directness and intimacy of having a phone in your hands at all hours, not much of this group's shooting is taking place, say, at home, or directly on the body, as in early video from the late 1960s after the development of the mobile Portapak. A few images involve my favorite mobile-device-photo tic: pictures taken at arm's length, facing up. Mobile devices seem to produce more heavenward images than any other technology ever has.

Ellen Susan's photograph of an active-duty US soldier seen from the side, with head-stabilizing device used in wet plate collodion photography.

surFACE, at Photographic Center Northwest, is portraits made using a technique invented in the 1850s. The five photographers here, brought together by curator Ann Pallesen, are, in contrast, earthbound, immobilized. They create impressions on glass (ambrotypes) and tin (tintypes) by preparing a plate with a wet chemical (collodion), inserting it into the camera, then requiring that subjects remain still for up to 60 seconds for shooting.

Ellen Susan uses the Civil War–era process to make varied portraits of active-duty US soldiers. Some hold their children, or their ancestors—fathers and grandfathers in the service, traditions represented in antique photographs the soldiers have chosen as companions. In two portraits lovingly framed alongside soft gray velvet pillows, Susan positions the camera so that the metal arms that stabilize the subjects' necks in the studio become visible, like dreaded spinal prosthetics after war injuries.