Mark Osterman opened the Emerson Gallery's William G. Roehrick '34 Lecture Series with a talk titled "Pencil of Nature, Hand of Man: Photography Before 1870" on October 7. Osterman is a photographic process historian at the George Eastman House International Museum of Photography and Film in Rochester, and specializes in making photographic images with the archaic techniques used in the mid-19th century. He talked about the evolution of photographic processes, from the pinhole camera and Wedgewood images to Daguerrotypes and collodion wet prints.
Osterman also showed slides of himself creating a collodian wet print, demonstrating the hands-on, intensive nature of the process. He said that techniques such as these were dirty and difficult, requiring cumbersome equipment and taking a long time, but in fact all pictures we see from the mid-19th century were made this way. With the invention of the gelatin print, photography became easier and these older techniques were abandoned, much as the gelatin print is now being abandoned for digital photography. Some photographers, however, including Osterman, are interested in using these techniques to create images the old-fashioned way.
The lecture was the first in a series in conjunction with the exhibit Hamilton Collects Photography: The First 100 Years at the Emerson Gallery. The next two lectures, "Vulgur Sucess: The Conquests and Conflicts of Early Photography" on Oct 21and "Pictorialism into Modernism" on Oct 28, will be held at 6 p.m. in the Chemistry Auditorium.
