Hybrid 2020If the digital revolution started in the 1980’s, it certainly climbed the barricades and asserted its presence in daily life in spring 2020. Out of necessity, Covid-19 has introduced digital, socially-distanced ways of communication and interaction to existing as well as new, (sometimes reluctant) audiences, who are having to adapt to new ways of working and socialising.
Many activities were cancelled or postponed due to lockdown restrictions, and ventures such as exploring new environments, socialising with friends or even meeting new ones, are now reliant on digital facilitators such as Teams, WhatsApp and Zoom, establishing a new norm for the new normal. As a photographer mainly using analogue photography and with an interest in interrupting conventional processes, this period of lockdown started to challenge my way of working, as it interrupted my own trajectory of exploring historical processes, and planned studio sessions had to be postponed due to lockdown and social distancing rules. I also wanted to document this period in a different way using the wetplate collodion process and started taking screen shots of conversations on my i-phone as a way to record the challenges of communicating on sometimes unreliable internet connections, with a view to immortalizing them as one-off archival plates. This hybrid approach of combining 21st century technology with 19th century methods required establishing some rules, such as limiting any digital postproduction to resizing and re-orientating, not to retouch the original images in any way or manner, and to allow the collodion process to add its own hand-crafted characteristics to the final image. To this effect, colour images were enlarged on a domestic LCD TV, and photographed with a 10x8 camera on trophy aluminium plates coated and sensitized with collodion and silver nitrate. After developing, fixing and washing, the plates are coated with a Sandarac varnish. The images are a curious mix of old and new technologies, incorporating artefacts from both processes, e.g. pour-marks and pixelations, frozen pixels and collodion beading. |