Astoria, NY
Stirring the Caldron, 2005
Wet Plate Collodion Tintype
Image size: 8 x 10 inches
$1,050 framed
To Purchase Contact 23 Sandy Gallery
www.andersonstaley.com
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Working with the wet-plate collodion process, invented in 1851, I am returning to an early mode of photography at a moment that the medium is again changing and revisiting photography’s perennial genres—portraiture, landscape and still life. The chemistry that is poured onto each glass or metal plate is less sensitive to light than film, requiring exposures of up to three minutes. The sitter must remain intently focused and present while the photographer sensitizes, exposes, and develops the image before the plate dries. Walter Benjamin associated this duration with “aura.” The subject, he writes, “focus[es] his life in the moment…during the considerable period of the exposure, the subject (as it were) grew into the picture, in sharp contrast with the appearances in a snapshot.”
Ambrotypes and tintypes are one-of-a-kind positive images that are exposed by the same light that bounces off the subject. I use 19th Century lenses to create a shallow depth of field- only part of the image is in focus—a person’s eyes, or hand, or a leaf on a tree. The immediate and highly physical wet-plate collodion process allows me to mix 19th Century manners of beholding with a 21st Century perspective on photography.Artist Biography
Keliy Anderson-Staley, born 1977, received a BA from Hampshire College, Amherst, MA and an MFA from Hunter College, NYC. Keliy teaches the collodion process at photography centers and colleges in NY, MA , and ME. Her work has been exhibited in galleries throughout the US. She lives and works in NYC.
All images and text copyright the artist. All rights reserved.
