Past perfect photos - Photography's Antiquarian Avant-Garde: The New Wave in Old Processes, by Lyle Rexer - Book Review

Photography's Antiquarian Avant-Garde: The New Wave in Old Processes, by Lyle Rexer, New York, Harry N. Abrams, 2002; 160 pages, $49.95.

Reading the history of photography in the way it has largely been written, as a narrative of technological progress, one gets the impression that the medium may well have reached its climactic moment. Digital technology delivers on all that has counted in the dominant storyline: speed, clarity, reproducibility, convenience and affordability. The drive toward expediency demanded sacrifices, however. Along the way, photography lost the heterogeneous surfaces and textures of older processes, and regard for the photograph as an object crafted by hand dissipated.

Photographic history can also be written, then, as a story of lost possibilities, which is how Lyle Rexer tells it in Photography's Antiquarian Avant-Garde: The New Wave in Old Processes. The mirror acuity of the polished silver daguerreotype: gone. The diffuse romanticism of the calotype: gone. The mysterious power of the ambrotype: gone. And so on. What Rexer, a freelance New York photo historian and critic, likens to "technological Darwinism" has driven these once-dominant methods to extinction. In the name of standardization, the rich Babel of photographic languages has been reduced to a soulless, placeless Esperanto.

Rexer laments the losses, while celebrating the redemptive efforts of a growing number of photographers who are reviving 19th-century processes. Their efforts constitute something of a grassroots revolution. Resisting the "antiphotographic" forces that have stripped the medium down to its function as a carrier of visually coded meaning, the antiquarian avant-garde reasserts the photograph's status as a tactile presence in itself. These artists restore to photography its original sense of the miraculous, reminding us of what inventor Fox Talbot recognized from the start, that the photograph is "a little bit of magic realized."

The artists that Rexer tracks--mostly North American, with a generous sprinkling of others--embrace the very qualities in the old processes that led to their obsolescence: quixotic materials, ritualistic processing and printing procedures, frequent accidents and irregularities. Antiquarians, Rexer states, return to photography's origins in "darkroom alchemy, coterie secrets, and tactile fascinations." While the biggest names in photography now--Andreas Gursky, et al.--make images that aspire to the scale and condition of the movie screen, the artists identified by Rexer often work quite small, their images more akin to the pages of a book.

France Scully Osterman's ruby ambrotype of a papaya and Gabor Kerekes's carbon dichromate image of shells both hark back to a taxonomic tradition in photography. Jody Ake's ambrotypes recall 19th-century studies in physiognomy. Jan van Leeuwen's staged kallitype titled The Meal at Emmaus is a sober update on the fictive composites of Oscar Rejlander. Artists of the antiquarian avant-garde, writes Rexer, seek "the most fruitful play between past associations and current intuitions."

Several artists Rexer discusses ally their adopted processes to subject matter of the same period. He tells of a tintypist named John Coffer who traveled the country by covered wagon in the 1970s and '80s, photographing Civil War reenactments. Robert Shlaer retraced the route of an 1853-54 expedition west, creating a set of topographic daguerreotypes to replace those made on the original trek and later destroyed by fire. Straddling the 19th and 21st centuries, much of this work generates sublime disjunctions, delicious anachronisms. Deborah Luster's tintypes of prisoners in correctional facilities resonate with the same stark, haunting presence as portraits of Civil War soldiers made using the same method 140 years earlier. Like their predecessors, Luster's pictures bridge the gap that circumstance (incarceration, conscription) can impose between the subject and the viewer of the image. Jerry Spagnoli's daguerreotype of the World Trade Center towers billowing smoke before their collapse disarms not only because of its subject matter, but additionally through the friction between the immediacy of the image and the process's associations with the pace, technology and politics of another time.

Rexer does a fine job describing the motivations and practices of the antiquarian avant-garde. There's poetry to his approach, which reads less like a treatise than an evocative series of inquiries ("can nature or a camera have a memory?"). His plea to restore value to the idiosyncratic over the streamlined, the physical over the virtual, touches a sensitive cultural nerve.

The book has just two clear shortcomings. First, Rexer asserts that the evolution of photography as an expressive medium does not follow its technological trajectory. Its mixed nature as science, magic and art accounts for its ambiguities, and for "its habit of continually calling itself into question," a quintessentially modern activity. Nevertheless, he falls back, unimaginatively, on technological categories to organize the book, dividing artists according to which process they use (daguerreotypes, paper negatives, glass plates, etc.) rather than finding other, perhaps deeper resonances between them, having to do with the ways they conceive of their work--as a tool of memory, for instance, as historical fiction, as a probe into issues of decay, time, evidence.