Link to this announcement
Mark Osterman: Hesitation. Ambrotype (2005)
Workshop on producing ambrotypes using the wet collodion process with Mark Osterman and France Scully-Osterman
In this workshop, participants will learn how to produce positives on glass plates (ambrotypes) using the wet collodion process. Participants will have the opportunity to create still lifes and self-portraits using a 19th-century camera. Following a demonstration, they will be guided step by step through the process, from cutting the glass to varnishing the finished image.
Instructions for preparing the necessary chemicals and troubleshooting, as well as a user guide in the form of the booklet “The Wet Plate Process, A Working Guide” by Mark Osterman, are included. No personal equipment or prior experience is required to take part. The workshop lasts two days and has two instructors and 10 participants.
The workshop will take place on 19–20 July 2007 at the State Academy of Fine Arts in Stuttgart, and on 27–28 July 2007 at the University of Applied Sciences for Technology and Economics in Berlin.
Registration for the course in Stuttgart at www.mediaconservation.org
Email: info@mediaconservation.org
Registration for the course in Berlin at www.f5.fhtw-berlin.de/krg
Email: koerber@fhtw-berlin.de
The participation fee is €300; special arrangements are available on request for students of the respective institutions. The workshop will be held in English.
(Participants are advised to bring dark work clothes, as they may get stained with silver nitrate.)
About the tutors: The Ostermans are respected photography historians and are regarded as the new masters of wet collodion photography. The recent revival of this process can be directly attributed to their research, their workshops and the exhibitions of their work. They are represented by the Howard Greenberg Gallery in New York. Their work has been featured in exhibitions and published in, amongst others, Paris Photo, Der Spiegel, Geo and most recently in Zoom (May/June 2007 issue).
Mark Osterman currently works as a historian of photographic processes in the Advanced Residency Programme for Photographic Conservation at the George Eastman House, International Museum of Photography and Film in Rochester, New York. Frances Scully Osterman is a visiting scholar at George Eastman House and teaches courses in the 19th-century daylight studio that the couple run in Rochester.
In 1995, the couple began publishing a manual on collodion photography and edited the Collodion Journal from 1995 to 2002. Their work is featured in various standard works on historical photographic processes, such as Coming into Focus (2001), Photography’s Antiquarian Avant-Garde (2002) and The Book of Alternative Photographic Processes (2000).
