SCULLY & OSTERMAN
THE LIGHT AT LACOCK
1 October - 30 October 2010
Opening Reception: Friday, 1 October 2010 | 6-9pm
About this Exhibition:
Anthony Brunelli Fine Arts is pleased to present a brand new body of work from Scully & Osterman. With renowned credentials in historic photographic processes, Scully & Osterman have consulted and taught professional photographers around the world, including world renowned contemporary photographer, Sally Mann. We are honored to present to you this new series, on exhibit to the public for the first time in our first floor gallery.
Mark Osterman and France Scully Osterman have created a collection of paper negatives at the birthplace photography; Lacock Abbey, in the village of Lacock, Wiltshire, England.
Using Wm. Henry Fox Talbot’s original process of photogenic drawing and his earliest camera designs, the Ostermans trod the same ground as the inventor and revisited the miracle of the first chemical sketches made by nature alone.
Celebrating the 175th anniversary of the negative these images were created at the twilight of photography. Along the way the couple made some discoveries of their own. Limitations of the early process and an inclement climate eventually guided the Ostermans to concentrate on photographing the effect of light that surrounds a subject rather than that which illuminates it. The results are painterly but also fugitive.
As in Talbot’s time, the same light that created these images also destroys them. And so, it is only by the ironic marriage of the digital pigment print that now displaces photography that these colorful sun sketches can be exhibited for the first time.
Bios:
Mark Osterman is Photographic Process Historian at George Eastman House International Museum of Photography and Film in Rochester, NY. He teaches the technical evolution of photography from Niepce heliographs to making gelatin emulsions. His students are scholars, museum curators, archivists and photograph conservators, educators, artists and photographers.
As an artist, his series, “Confidence,” based on a traveling medicine show he performed for twenty years, received high praise in Photo Review, After Image and Zoom magazines.
Osterman’s most recent writings on the subject of early photographic processes include the 19th century chapter for the Focal Encyclopedia of Photography and a chapter on making gelatin emulsions for the Book of Alternative Photographic Processes, by Christopher James. He began research in historic photographic processes while attending the Kansas City Art Institute in the 1970s.
France Scully Osterman is an artist, writer, teacher and guest scholar at George Eastman House International Museum of Photography and Film. She has received glowing reviews of her "Sleep" exhibit in Art in America, Paris Photo Magazine and the Village Voice.
Osterman is recognized for her extensive knowledge of early photographic processes including photogenic drawings, wet-plate collodion, and albumen and salt print methods. She teaches private tutorials and workshops in her Rochester, New York, 19th century skylight studio.
The Ostermans’ give lectures, demonstrations and workshops throughout the United States, Canada, Mexico, Japan and Europe. Together they published the quarterly publication, The Collodion Journal from 1995 to 2002.
Their work has been featured in Photography's Antiquarian Avant-Garde, The New Wave in Old Process Photography by Lyle Rexer, Coming into Focus by John Barnier, The Book of Alternative Photographic Processes by Christopher James (both editions), Le Vocabulaire Technique de la Photographie by Anne Cartier-Bresson (2008), and the third edition of Photographic Possibilities, by Robert Hirsch (2008).
Their images are in the collections of the Museum of Fine Art, Houston; The Nelson-Atkins Museum, Kansas City; George Eastman House International Museum of Photography; Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas; The Taubman Museum of Art, Roanoke; Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University, Ithaca; the Michener Museum, Doylestown, PA and numerous private collections. They are both represented by Howard Greenberg Gallery, NYC and Tilt Gallery, Phoenix, AZ.
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