Chapter 1: Artists
List of contributing artists and their bios.
Heather Oelklaus
Heather Oelklaus (USA, born in 1972) lives in Colorado Springs where she creates handmade cameras that act as an integral part of her artmaking. She has made pinhole cameras out of a bellhop cart, vintage truck, teapot, lunch box and nesting dolls. Heather builds unique camera obscuras to function as objects of contemplation.
IG: heather_oelklaus
Jennifer Crane
Jennifer Crane is a Canadian artist whose work investigates the relationship between the body and the lens. Through a combination of historical and contemporary photographic techniques, she explores themes of memory, time, place and archival practices. Her work has been exhibited internationally and can be found in both private and public collections, including the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia. She lives in Saskatoon, where she is an associate professor in the Department of Art and Art History, at The University of Saskatchewan.
IG: jenn.jenncrane
Stephanie L. Paine
Stephanie L. Paine is a visual artist working within the expanded field of photography utilizing digital and traditional technologies with hand-built cameras. Landscape is a recurring foundation in her work to address the connection of land to the human experience while bringing awareness to the impermanence of the natural world. She teaches photography in the Department of Visual Arts at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette.
Dan Estabrook
Dan Estabrook has been making contemporary art for almost 30 years using the photographic techniques and processes of the 19th century. By creating his own “found photographs,” he has sought to reinvent the history of photography in his own image, investing seemingly anonymous images with personal symbols and stories. This is not to relive some idealized past but to highlight how our understanding of the past is completely subjective and dependent on the present. As with any look backward, death, transformation, memory and loss are close at hand, but Estabrook works with a wink and a nod to the fact that every photograph contains a little death. While the photograph may still hang onto its tenuous role as a bearer of truth, elements of sculpture, painting and drawing are used to pit the hand against the machine, the dream against the daylight.
Estabrook has exhibited widely and has received several awards, including an Artist’s Fellowship from the NEA in 1994. He is also the subject of a documentary film by Anthropy Arts. He lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.
Wlodek Witek
Wlodek Witek’s work has developed and transitioned from documentary to landscape and now historical processes on paper. He spent the earliest part of his image making life in Poland, where he learned the basic fi lm-and-paper-based processes and exhibited. Hecontinued with traditional practice in England and Norway.
Witek’s current art practice parallels his profession as a conservator of paper and photographs, which fuels his passion for the medium. After moving to Norway his early work was exhibited in 1984 in Oslo, at Galleri Foton. The change of environment gave way to an endless search for new forms of visual and creative expression.
He found inspiration from the collections we worked with. For example, early explorers like Fridtjof Nansen inspired him to make “Suggen’s diary,” an untold story of a polar dog which followed Nansen faithfully until 1895 when the dog died at the hands of his owner. This collection of cyanotype work was exhibited in Poland in 2004, at the Gdanska Galeria Fotografii.
Since 2010, Witek has devoted himself to the calotype, following in the footsteps of H.T. Winther and W.H.F. Talbot. His current work was exhibited in 2018 and 2019, titled “Travels in Time” first in Gdansk at The Academy of Fine Arts and later in Oslo at Galleri Balder. Witek is an internationally exhibited artist, and his works have been seen at Lacock Abbey, Louisville, Budapest, Gdansk, Milan and Oslo.
Binh Danh
Binh Danh (MFA Stanford; BFA San Jose State University) emerged as an artist of national importance with work that investigates his Vietnamese heritage and our collective memory of war. His technique incorporates his invention of the chlorophyll printing process, in which photographic images appear embedded in leaves through the
action of photosynthesis. His newer body of work focuses on 19th-century photographic processes, applying them in an investigation of battlefield landscapes and contemporary memorials. A recent series of daguerreotypes celebrated the United States National Park system during its anniversary year.
His work is in the permanent collections of the National Gallery of Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, The DeYoung Museum, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Center for Creative Photography, the George Eastman Museum and many others. He received the 2010 Eureka Fellowship from the Fleishhacker Foundation, and in 2012, he was a featured artist at the 18th Biennale of Sydney in Australia. He is represented by Haines Gallery, San Francisco, California, and Lisa Sette Gallery in Phoenix, Arizona. He lives and works in San Jose, California, and teaches photography at San Jose State University.
Jerry Spagnoli
Jerry Spagnoli lives and works in New York City. He has two new books coming out in 2022, “Situations Seen From Considerable Distance” and “Local Stories” published by Steidl. His other monographs include “Regard,” “American Dreaming” and “Daguerreotypes” published by Steidl and “Heirloom Harvest” Published by Bloomsbury.
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His work is held in the collections of The Whitney Museum of American Art, The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, The National Portrait Gallery, The Nelson Atkins Museum, Musee d’Elysee, Musee Carnevalet, The Fogg Museum, The Museum of Modern Art, The Chrystler Museum, The Art Institute of Chicago and other major collections.
Takashi Arai
Takashi Arai is an artist and filmmaker. Arai does not see daguerreotype as a nostalgic reproduction of a classical method. Instead, he has made it his medium, finding it a reliable device for storing memory far better for recording and transmitting interactions with his subjects than modern photography. In 2016, Arai received the 41st Kimura Ihei Award for his first monograph, “MONUMENTS” (PGI, 2015). His works are held in the Smithsonian Institution collections, MFA Boston, MOMA Tokyo and Musée Guimet, among others.
Dror Maayan
Dror Maayan is an Israeli artist-photographer. He exhibits extensively and collaborates with academic, public and private institutions. In 2011, his photographs of graffiti on the Israeli-Palestine separation barrier were published in the book Facing the Wall (Walther König, Köln).
Maayan owns the only 19th-century photographic studio in Israel and works in a variety of historical techniques, shooting with original antique cameras. He revived and expanded the limits of niepceotype/hyalotype, one of the oldest and rarest photographic techniques invented in 1847 and is the only one in the world creating with it today.
Quinn Jacobson
Quinn Jacobson, American, born in 1964. He began his career as a photographer in the United States Army. He holds an undergraduate and graduate degree in photography. He’s been working in the wet collodion process for 20 years. He has created four major bodies of work: Portraits from Madison Avenue (2003), Vergangenheitsbewältigung (2010), The American West Portraits (2012) and Ghost Dance: Native American Massacre Sites in Colorado (2019). He has published four technical books on the process.
IG: historicphoto, FB: quinnjacobson, Twitter: @quinnjacobson
Rashod Taylor
Rashod Taylor (born in 1985) is an emerging contemporary photographer whose work is a window into the Black American experience. Taylor attended Murray State University and earned a bachelor’s degree in art with a specialization in fine art photography. He has since exhibited and been published nationally and internationally.
Luther Gerlach
Luther Gerlach is an artist working in historical photographic processes. For over 35 years, he has been involved in many aspects of photography, including lecturing and demonstrating at institutions such as the J. Paul Getty Museum and UCLA. As an expert in historical processes, he has contributed to the Getty Museum’s Encyclopedia
of Photographic Processes. Gerlach’s work is exhibited internationally and included in major private and museum collections, including LACMA’s permanent collection.
FB: Luther Gerlach, IG: @luthergerlach
Amy Burke
Amy Burke is a Pennsylvania-based artist. She earned her BA from the Pennsylvania State University in 1998 and her MFA from the California Institute of the Arts in 2004. She can be found in her home darkroom working with old cameras and teaching her young daughters about early photographic techniques. It is a source of pride that her children, when given a new digital camera, ask “where does the film go?” Her work has been exhibited nationally.
Nejc Urankar
Nejc Urankar is a 25-year-old photography graduate of the Academy of Fine Arts and Design, a researcher and practitioner of alternative photographic processes from the dawn of photography. Combining the love for nature with the slowness of the alternative photographic processes is his meditation, enabling him to connect with the surroundings on the deepest of levels and capture those small miracles of nature.
www.youtube.com/channel/UCkgsi_Pxixghd8xluKSs9eQ
IG: lost_light_art
Melitte Buchman
Melitte Buchman discovered chemical photography while studying geology at the University of Rochester. It changed everything. She variously became a grad student, lab rat, managed commercial photography studios, did exhibition printing and fi nally setup digital initiatives for major cultural heritage institutions in New York, Egypt, Lebanon, Afghanistan, UAE and Albania. Balancing the overload of the technological with the alchemical, she works in collodion and salt printing. She is working on her project “rediscovering NYC” and teaching photography. www.melittebuchman.com
IG: melitteb
Gary Edward Blum
Born in Montara, California, a coastal town 30 minutes south of San Francisco, Gary Edward Blum has spent the better part of two decades exploring duality and dependent opposition through his paintings and photography. The grandson of both Italian and Swiss immigrants, he was surrounded by stories of exploration and independence as a child. In 2000, Blum traveled to India, where he was exposed to eastern philosophy and religion. Upon his return, he began to cultivate the ideas of dependent opposition and meditation in his work that are still evident today. He earned his MFA from the University of California Berkeley in 2002, a BA in graphic design from California State University-Chico in 1993 and was an affiliate artist at Headlands Center for the Arts from 2015 to 2017. Blum’s work has been exhibited throughout the United States and can be found in the permanent collections of the Crocker and Monterey Art Museums. He has also been reviewed in publications such as the LA Times, SF Chronicle and Art in America.
Alida Rodrigues
Alida Rodrigues (born 1983 in Angola) lives and works in London. She works within the medium of collage, which brings together 19th-century portrait photographs, the historical reference of plants, the act of collecting and cataloguing. She uses botanical illustrations to show the exoticism of the plants referencing distant land from which they originated. Rodrigues received her BA in fine art from The Slade School of Fine Art in 2007. Her work has been exhibited internationally. www.alidarodrigues.com
IG: @alidaarodrigues
Kimberly Anderson
Kimberly Anderson tells stories of personal struggle and stories of mythology, legend and the land we inhabit. She has been a large and ultra-large format photographer for the past 30 years, making images with salt, platinum-palladium, paper-negatives, AZO and silver-gelatin. Her last major work, The Mama Dragon Story Project, had her photographing and interviewing over 135 mothers of LGBTQ+ children and sharing their stories of parental love transcendent of religious dogma. This story-telling work pushed her into becoming a psychotherapist working with trauma, high-demand religious recovery, families and couples, specifically within the LGBTQ+ population. A transgender woman, Anderson has focused much of her work on transgender youth and their families. Anderson has recently relocated to the Arlington, Virginia area practicing as a marriage and family therapist and re-acquainting herself with the 8 x 10 camera and making wet plates.
John Beaver
John Beaver has used old processes for over 20 years to make new types of negatives. This includes his development of the cyano-negative process, innovative work with instant film, developing a versatile and expressive printing-out process, and most recently, a resin-based direct positive process. He is a Professor of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh. John has exhibited photographs in solo exhibitions and juried competitions in Wisconsin, Ohio, New York, Louisiana, Minnesota, Missouri, Oregon and Colorado. He is the author of (in three volumes), The Physics and Art of Photography (Morgan and Claypool, San Rafael).
Maria Martinez-Cañas
Maria Martinez-Cañas was born in Havana, Cuba. She received a BFA in photography from the Philadelphia College of Art and an MFA in photography from the School of The Art Institute of Chicago. An artist who works with innovative, non-traditional photographic media, she has exhibited extensively in the United States and abroad, with 49 one-person exhibitions and over 300 group exhibitions. Her works are represented by Fredric Snitzer Gallery, Miami, and Julie Saul Projects, New York.
IG: @mphotogram
Diane Deery Richards
Diane Deery Richards (1971–), a land artist, from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. She is an innovator with fibers and natural elements. Water is her vehicle to explore the relationship between nature and art. The result is purely harmonious. She received her Master of Fine Arts degree from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (2018) and her BFA and Art Education from Moore College of Art and Design (1993, 2008). Currently, she teaches digital photography and woodworking at The Hill School.
Kümei Kirschmann
Kümei Kirschmann is an Argentinian artist and photographer committed exclusively to experimental photography. Most of her knowledge comes from curiosity, personal experimentation and practice. In a workshop on alternative processes, she discovered the world of the non-conventional—solargraphs, cyanotypes, double exposures and film soup—and realized she wanted that to be her main field of action. She runs workshops to expand this type of art, coming back to the origins of photography to create contemporary results.
IG: kumeiaa
Bob Kiss
Bob Kiss began photographing in 1961 and attended the Rochester Institute of Technology five-year BS/MS program. Initially based in his Manhattan advertising and fashion photography studio in 1976, he also studied filmmaking at New York University and theater directing at Masterworks Laboratory Theater. After 20 years in the fashion fast lanes of Paris, Munich, Milan, London, Los Angeles, Rio and Sao Paulo, he found a home in Barbados in 1993, where he continued his advertising and fine art photography.
In Barbados, his photography has appeared in Maco, Island Life, Ins and Outs magazines and advertisements for Cable and Wireless and many other Barbados clients. Shows of his fine art photographs have appeared at Queen’s Park Gallery, Zemicon, Tides, The Gallery of Caribbean Art, Lancaster Gallery, Aweipo, On The Wall Gallery, The University of Main Gallery, City Gallery at Waterfront Park Charleston SC, Cin Cin by the Sea, as well as the Alan Klotz Gallery in New York City. One of his platinum-palladium prints, FIAT LUX, was recently shown in LOOK 15; The Liverpool International Photography Festival. His photographs appeared in the Andy Warhol retrospective, which opened at the Whitney in Manhattan and toured the world. One of his photographs of Andy Warhol is in the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh. His work is in private and institutional collections on three continents.
For the last 23years, he has also been making platinum-palladium, cyanotype, albumen, salt and uranotype prints. His book projects include fi ne art black-and-white photographs of Florence and Tuscany and BARBADOS CHATTEL HOUSES, published in November 2011. His awards include winning Gold for the 2005 ADDY best regional advertising photograph.
In September 2013, he showed 18 large platinum-palladium Chattel House prints at City Gallery at Waterfront Park in Charleston, South Carolina. His show, Beautiful People of the 80s of mural-sized prints of celebrities he had photographed for INTERVIEW, Paris, German and British Vogue, Town and Country were displayed at Cin Cin by the Sea, Barbados from February to June 2013 and in 2018. This exhibition displayed 12 platinum-palladium and uranotype prints at Cin Cin of tiny, dried objects greatly enlarged to 20 Å~ 24 prints in a show titled Things Unseen Into Things Known.
Bob also presented video demonstrations of the Uranotype process to the Alternative Process International Symposium in October 2013 and 2017 and has recently been certified as an Assessor in the film and video industry.
Nick Russell
& Charles Witherspoon
Nick Russell and Charles Witherspoon artistically document the history of science. Their exploration of radio astronomy observatories has taken them from high deserts to dense forests in search of telescopes that rank among the largest moving objects on land. Their nuclear history work traces the production, use and legacy of nuclear weapons through images of uranium mines, weapons labs, plutonium production facilities, testing sites, delivery systems, targeted cities and nuclear waste and disaster sites.
Anne Eder
Anne Eder is an interdisciplinary artist working in photography, sculpture and installation, ceramics and fiction writing. She has been internationally recognized and awarded, including multiple Julia Margaret Cameron awards in alternative process photography. She is faculty at Harvard University and Penumbra Foundation and was guest faculty at Princeton University in Spring 2021, partnered with Guggenheim fellow, Deana Lawson. She lives in Boston writing fairy tales and catering to her fabulous chihuahua, The Brain.
IG: @darcflower
Antonio Turok
Antonio Turok was born in 1955 in Mexico City. At age 17, he moved to Chiapas, where he lived for 30 years and began his photographic career.
Standing on the edge of joy and despair, I focused my lens at people, landscapes, fiestas, civil uprisings and eventually produced abstractions of this extraordinary, ordinary everyday reality in shades of black and white: the black and white of opposition, the black and white of balance and harmony.
He was a photojournalist for Mexico in the civil wars of Nicaragua, El Salvador and Guatemala in the 80s. He was the first photographer to photograph Sub Comandante Marcos in the 1994 Indigenous Uprising (Zapatista Movement) in San Cristobal de las Casas, Chiapas Mexico and later in Oaxaca, Mexico in 2009, he documented the Civil Uprising of Teachers Union (APPO), which was a movement against the government. On September 11, 2001, he documented the tragic event in New York City while visiting friends and family. And for over 20 years, he has photographed Mexican immigrants in the United States from the Mid-West industrial area to the migrant farmworkers in California.
In 2017, he went to document the Woman’s March on the day of the inauguration of President Donald Trump. These past two years, Turok has been covering migrant stories from the northern and southern borders of Mexico of the people trying to reach North America for a better life coming from Central America and Africa.
He has collaborated in different publications such as Aperture, Camera Work, Chronicle, La Jornada, DoubleTake, Paris Match, Le Monde, Stern, The Independent and Proceso, among others. His photography is part of numerous collective books and catalogs on Mexican photography in Latin America and Europe.
Antonio Turok has been published in these books: Images of Nicaragua (Casa de las Imagenes, 1988) and Chiapas: El Fin del Silencio/The End of Silence (Aperture/Era, 1998); Pozos as seen by Antonio Turok (2015); Con tinta en la boca/With Ink in the Mouth “The documentary photography of Antonio Turok” by Dr. Anna Susi (Editorial Elefanta, 2018); La fi esta y la rebelión/The Fiesta and the Rebellion (Era, 2018). His work is included in several Museum collections on photography in Mexico, Latin America, the United States and Europe.
Mr. Turok has obtained the Mother Jones International Fund for Documentary Photography Award in 1994. He has received grants from the Guggenheim Foundation and The Rockefeller Foundation Bicultural Grant for Mexico/United States, Sistema Nacional de Creadores of Mexico (FONCA), The Scholarship Henkels Interdisciplinary Visiting Speaker and NALAC Transnational Cultural Remittances grant. He recently obtained the Photographic Merit Medal 2018 awarded by the National Institute of Anthropology and History’s Photography Library in Mexico. He is considered one of the most important documentary photographers of our time.
Pradip Malde
Pradip Malde is a photographer and professor at the University of the South, Sewanee, Tennessee. Much of his work considers the experience of loss and how it serves as a catalyst for regeneration. He received a 2018 Guggenheim Fellowship and is represented in the collections of Museum of the Art Institute, Chicago; Princeton University Museum; Victoria & Albert Museum, London; Yale University Museum; and the Scottish National
Portrait Gallery, Edinburgh, among others.
Twitter: pradipmalde
Roberto Huarcaya
Roberto Huarcaya was born in Lima in 1959. Graduated in psychology at the Universidad Católica del Perú (Lima, 1978–1984). Studied cinema at the Instituto Italiano de Cultura (Lima, 1982) and photography at the Centro del Video y la Imagen (Madrid, 1989). His work is part of the Maison Européenne de la Photographie of Paris; the Fine Arts Museum of Houston; the COCA Center on Contemporary Art, in Seattle; the Museo de Arte de Lima; the Centro de Arte Contemporáneo Wilfredo Lam in Havana, Cuba; the Muac Museum in Mexico City, among others.
Rosario Martinez-Cañas
Rosario Martinez-Cañas was born in Havana, Cuba. She graduated from Loyola University with a BA in Communications and received her MFA in Graphic Design from Miami International University of Art and Design. In 1991, she founded The Image Designers Group, an award-winning graphic design studio, featured in several books, including Hot Graphics USA and LogoLounge 3000 Animal & Mythology Logos Master Library. In 1999,
Rosario became an adjunct professor at New World School of the Arts where in 2006 she became full-time faculty for graphic design.
Rosario served on the board of the American Institute of Graphic Arts (AIGA) Miami Chapter. She supervises the NWSA AIGA student chapter, and she and her students have raised funds to attend design conferences throughout the world. She has also supervised and curated several NWSA exhibitions and was instrumental in starting Art for New Art, New World School of the Arts’ permanent art collection of established artists to serve as both an inspiration and learning tool for students.
Diana H. Bloomfield
Diana H. Bloomfield, an exhibiting artist for over 35 years who specializes in 19th century photographic printing techniques. Her images and one-of-a-kind handmade artist books are exhibited internationally and are included in numerous books and publications. Diana’s art is also in many public and private collections, including the Norton Museum of Art, located in West Palm Beach, Florida and the New Mexico History Museum/Palace of the Governors, located in Santa Fe, New Mexico. A native North Carolinian, Diana lives and works in Raleigh, North Carolina, where she received her MA in English Literature and Creative Writing from North Carolina State University. She teaches photography workshops throughout the country and in her beautiful backyard studio. Diana is represented by the Ryan Gallery at Art Intersection, located in Gilbert, Arizona, and by photo-eye Gallery (Photographer’s Showcase), located in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
Rodney James
Rodney James’s interest lies in the pervasive quality of media throughout the world. Combining digital and analog processes, his work reflects on the ever-present visual language saturating our lives. He’s currently joined forces with Revolution Me Media Lab, an organization dedicated to providing media art workshops to high school students and young adults. His aim is to share the importance of photography as an artistic tool for both visual exploration and societal reflection.
Tony Gonzalez
Tony Gonzalez is an artist living in New York City and Hudson, New York. He received his BFA from the Cooper Union and his MFA from Yale University. Since 2002, Gonzalez has been teaching full-time at Queens College, CUNY. Gonzalez is a contributing author for The Book of Alternative Photographic Processes by Christopher James, Gum Printing, A Step-by-Step Manual Highlighting Artists and Their Creative Practice by Christina Z. Anderson and Alternate Processes in Photography by Brian Arnold.
www.tonygonzalezartist.com www.thegumbichromatejournal.com
IG: @gonoma
Alan Greene
Alan Greene was introduced to art photography at the age of 20. Since then, photography has been one of the few constants in his life, his photography having taken a multitude of forms. The best compliment he ever received was from a photography professor when he was in graduate school: “You are very opinionated, but you have an open mind.” He hopes that that indeed remains the case.
Luciana Quagliato McClure
Luciana Quagliato McClure (b. 1982) is a mother, artist, activist, independent curator and professor, originally from Brazil. She resides in Connecticut with her partner, the painter Nathan Lewis and her two children.
Through exploration of natural environments, my photographs address universal themes of stillness and quietness, with a layer of melancholia. I attempt to evoke these feelings through the use of available light, shadow and fog. These elements are both ephemeral and solitary, which are feelings I am deeply aware of during my day-to-day life and through my interaction with the world—searching for connection and feeling a sense of belonging in the spaces I inhabit, wander. Forest walks, particularly become solace and function as healing, spiritual experiences. As a photographer, documentation through image making is an important part of my daily practice. Being a mother, it is nearly impossible to separate the presence of motherhood in my work. My photographs are an open journal into my passing existence of being a woman, queer, mother, lover, daughter, human living under a constant social, personal and individual’s gaze. The chaos asks me to seek moments of stillness, to stop, document, photograph. Materiality is a recreation process, beginning with the camera, to the screen, and onto paper or another medium. It is essential to be very mindful of how it translates into a permanent object.
The Japanese expression “mono no aware” it means “ the impermanence of things, the awareness of the sadness of existence,” for there cannot be any real beauty without the intense note of decay.” My work attempts to embody sentiments of impermanence; beauty, identity, motherhood and sadness are woven into each other, and we must experience sorrow, doubt to know feel the hope of renewal.
www.feministartproject.rutgers.edu/regional-groups/
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