Hollywood stars in unusual images.
The photographer Stephen Berkman makes your shots on the technology of the mid-nineteenth century wet plate collodion process opened in 1851. Its essence consists in obtaining a photographic negative images on glass plates with collodion emulsion.
“I’m interested in photography’s first 40 years, because even then she reached the peak, although in its very beginning, explains Stephen Berkman. Since the process of photography has not improved, just more convenient. I like the visual code of the nineteenth century, its formality, it looked like this fine line between art and science. I was intrigued by the fact that we are now considering past that in these pictures was a present.”
“I shoot with natural North light, using a large format camera with Dallmeyer lens from 1864, where the glass is covered with dust of the nineteenth century, probably the reason why my photos look vintage”.
“A typical exposure is 30 to 40 seconds without support tripod, which causes slight blur”.
By the way, I didn’t know that early to take pictures used a “posing Stand” (Posing Stand) or head restraint (Head Rest).
Yeah. Exposure for these images was large enough to freeze in one position for, say, 40 seconds, the man was difficult (especially a child or an old man). Today there is a misconception that this stand was used only to do post-mortem photos, in fact it is not.
“My source of inspiration — the photographer Nadar (Gaspard Felix Tournaschon) — continues Stephen Berkman. A number of his works, the circle of people he photographed, are fascinating. His works provoked me to study of process of wet collodion, which was stimulated to start their idealistic quest in photography nineteenth century”.
Nadar was a theater playwright and a highly respected portrait painter. As a journalist, he worked with Daumier as a cartoonist in the magazine “Charivari”. In 1852 he became a co-owner of the Studio of his brother Adrien. Contemporaries called him “the Titian of photography”. Nadar wrote: “Photography is a wonderful discovery… Theory can be learned in an hour of basic techniques for a day… But what cannot be taught is the feeling for light. The way the light falls on the face, you have to catch yourself. To get the similarities, rather than a banal portrait, you have to enter into an Alliance with posing, to feel his mind and character.”
Steven Berkman also draws inspiration from such writers as Herman Melville, Edgar Allan PoE, Jorge Luis Borges and Franz Kafka, which is reflected in his photos. Some of them are very mystical subject.
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