Online: Historic process demonstrations

[Michael Pritchard]

Eastman Museum, Rochester, NY, is hosting process historian Mark Osterman who will share techniques from the history of photography and demonstrating some of the methods.used. 

The talks are being held over four months and are free to attend, although pre-booking is required. They will take place via Zoom.  

The four demonstrations are: 

• Tuesday, 1 September 2020 at 1300 (1800 BST). Clouds and combination printing. Many nineteenth-century landscape photographs are cloudless. Early photographic negatives documented light blue and white as the same value, resulting in blank skies. In this live online program, Process Historian Mark Osterman will discuss the reasons for these cloudless skies and demonstrate the nineteenth-century technique of combination printing from two separate negatives.
• Tuesday, 13 October 2020 at 1300 (1800 BST). Early optics in photography. Before there was photography, there was the study of light and lenses. In this presentation, Process Historian Mark Osterman will demonstrate how light can be manipulated and used for photography and share the basics of optics that were foundational in the invention of photography: from classifying simple lenses to using a camera obscura for gazing, drawing, or photographic experiments. 
• Tuesday, 3 November 2020 at 1300 (1700 GMT). Early silver processes. The first successful process used for photography was based on the light sensitivity of silver chloride. Experiments in silver chloride date to the eighteenth century, but the chemistry was not fully understood until William Henry Fox Talbot conducted and documented his exhaustive tests in the 1830s. In this virtual talk, Process Historian Mark Osterman will share what Talbot built upon and then perfected.
• Tuesday, 3 December 2020 at 1300 (1700 GMT). Nineteenth century retouching techniques. The limited sensitivity of nineteenth-century photographic materials gave rise to a number of curious but effective techniques to make photographs appear more natural. In this live presentation, Process Historian Mark Osterman will show examples of early negative retouching and then demonstrate some of these rare techniques. 

The talks are free, but must be pre-booked. Click the link here.

They are supported by Art Bridges and the National Endowment for the Arts.