She was known for two things: illustrations of poems & other texts, and portraits of her Victorian contemporaries. The illustrations look a little contrived today; but the portraits, especially the monumental head-shots she did towards the end of her career, remain mesmerising.
All these portraits were made with very long exposures - typically 8-15 minutes, as the wet plate collodion technique demanded. Those long exposures are partly responsible for the wonderful softness and blurring in her images, but I think there's something in the quality of collodion itself that seems richer and deeper than any negative film or even slide film I've ever seen. It just seems to contain more time, somehow.
In her own day, the softness of her images was not always accepted; she was criticized for poor technique. They may have seemed fuzzy in an age when photographic sharpness was prized - yet more than a century later, her images retain their power, in a way that many other collodion images do not.
I think Cameron knew exactly what she was doing. She was using the collodion's unique texture and capacity for depth to create images that appear to come not only from another time, but from somewhere altogether timeless - so, for me, transcending time in the most extraordinary way.
I am not sure if Cameron's images are medieval and of another world, or modern and readily understandable by us.
ReplyDeleteI have created a link to your post because I used medieval themes in my post... and you have showed modernish individual portraits very nicely.
Hels
to the gentleman amateur. . . great to meet you on flickr , and i thank you for your many kind comments . . i tried to find a ''contact me'' , email address for you, but couldn't . . i'm new to blogging and flickr, as you can see. . so maybe i haven't learned the ropes yet ! . . helen.
ReplyDeletehello I found your flickr and I am wondering what camera do you use? Most of your photographs look like polaroids..
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