First though, I wanted to make an image, a fun and deeply personal image, an homage to The Beatles, the band which taught me a lot of English when I was growing up in soviet Moscow. Bootlegged tapes and hand-typed lyrics that were passed around underground, provided me with much joy against the drab backdrop of a growing up in a collapsing state. I learned all their songs phonetically, long before being able to distinguish between each word, and I remember a few instances of singing a line to my English teacher in order for her to decipher it. One of the songs I loved the most was Here Comes The Sun. It was infinitely happy, and the lyrics were also simple enough for me to understand. I decided to employ my Morsiple Exposure method once again, this time pushing the method a bit further, and hoping to catch some decent detail in foreground during a brutal 5.5 hour exposure. I chose the historic Spreckels Organ as the setting for this. World's largest outdoor organ seemed appropriate to pair with one of the world's most beloved bands. The trick was that the organ is only open to view for just over an hour on Sundays from 2pm to just past 3pm, during the free performances that are held year-round. I knew that during most of the time I would be writing out my Morse code message using the sun, the organ pipes would be shielded by the metal rolling door, so with the best possible exposure all I could hope for was a ghost of the actual pipes as they are exposed 'through' the door. To make the most of it, I timed my exposure in such a way that the series of dashes, which happen to all be mostly bunched together, were all exposed while the door was open and organ pipes were visible. Total length of actual exposure time was 74.5min. Including the spaces though, the whole experience took over five hours. Below is the framed 4x5 daguerreotype on 18-gauge solid silver plate, in which "Here Comes The Sun" is spelled out in Morse code using the sun. I decided to frame it in a way that shows the plate in full, with all the joyful accidents that occurred along the edges. In order to do so, six spacers made of 30-gauge fine silver strips were placed around the edges.
While I was working on the above image, two more silver plates arrived, this time of thinner gauges. I may have mentioned this before, but in the USA there seems to be only one supplier of fine silver sheets, and there are only two options as far as width of the sheet you're buying - 12in or 6in. 12in width is great, as it easily cuts into three 4in increments, or 8+4. As I wasn't sure if these thinner plates would work out at all, I didn't want to potentially throw away bunch of money, so I chose the 6in wide sheets, and ordered them in 3 inch length. This would also provide me with an opportunity to work with a panoramic format, even though a rather miniature one.
Upon receiving the plates and examining them, I did think that perhaps I went too thin. 22-gauge is 0.644mm and 23-gauge is 0.573mm, and they are only available in 1/4 hard strength, with a bushed finish surface, which takes a good amount of effort to polish off initially. Both plates seemed almost too flimsy to work with, and I had to alter my usual polishing methods in order not to bend them. I would say that 22-gauge is as thin as I'll go in the future, but if I have enough funds I'd probably prefer 20-gauge. I did however just order another 22-gauge 6x3in plate, intended for an image that I'll touch upon a little later in this post.
After figuring out a decent way to safely polish such thin sheets of silver, I was faced with my usual mental block regarding what image is it that actually deserves a place upon the plates. Michelangelo is said to have viewed creation of his sculptures as liberating them from marble, and I can't help but relate to that sentiment in regards to working with daguerreotype medium. Each time a nanostructure of crystals grows upon an exposed plate, a part of my vision of nature and existence is released from a solid silver surface, and I dare not take that for granted.
Luckily, inspiration for the first image came in a form of this blog entry by Simone Wicca, a photographic artist based in Brazil, in which she interviews Ken Nelson, who can only be described as a giant and a legend within the world of modern daguerreotype. Ken has been making daguerreotypes for one year longer than I've been alive, and commands a sea of knowledge of both the technique itself and of it's development in historic and modern times. I highly recommend reading that interview, and look forward to more interviews that Simone has planned.
The last image supplementing that interview is titled "My Back Yard, Rochester, New York", and that image resonated with me as soon as I saw it. It looks like such a peaceful and relaxing place, with fallen autumn leaves all around a shadowed picnic bench, with a classic wooden fence delineating paradise's borders. Some day I'd love to have a back yard like that, but that's likely beyond the realm of possibilities in this lifetime. However, I've been renting my darkroom and studio space for 15 years now, and every time I walk up the plastic stairs to my metal door, I do get a view of someone else's back yard, and that view has seen me through a lot, and vice versa. Over the last decade and a half, I had a chance to learn multiple photographic techniques as well as to test a lot of various equipment and chemistry. Every time I tested a new lens, or collodion formula, made paper negatives of tried my first daguerreotypes, I would place the camera on the stairs by my studio, and make images of that back yard. At first I didn't keep them, but then decided that I might as well make it a running documentary, and so at this point I probably have close to 100 4x5in tintypes of that yard. For a long time there was a beautiful 40ft tall tree there in the back by the fence. The squat building in foreground was a burned out and fully gutted garage and storage space, missing a roof and housing only rodents. A lone elderly hoarder lady lived in the large house in back, while the owner, a man in his 70s with a tremendous white beard, occupied one of the apartments in the front house, while renting out the other half as well. Every once in a while I would see the old lady emerge from the door facing my stairs and slide a bowl of cat food onto the lower part of the roof above her. Cats came around in droves, and at times there would be 20+ of those bowls up there, in the shade of that beautiful tree. Meanwhile my domain ended at the fence the reader can see at the very bottom of the following images. Time passed, and the owner passed with it. In his place came his daughter, who had her own great life in Norther California, and just saw the property as fantastic extra income. A great deal of remodeling was done on the yard to make it look like something seen on good real estate ads, old lady was evicted, burned down garage made into a studio apartment, and the tree was cut down and uprooted, for nobody needs trees and their pesky falling leaves these days. I have tintypes of the whole process, including the day the tree was killed, with one merciless arborist still up there about 25ft in the air on the last remaining large branch. That back yard has so much potential, but it's never really used. I've seen that grill fired up less than ten times over the last few years, and the raised vegetable beds are usually fallow as well. The bare minimum succulents don't take much care, and neither does that red plant with a straight stem and pointy leaves. And of course there's fake grass where they for some reason chose not to put sandy dirt. But the potential is there, and I see that potential day in and day out. The rest of my view includes seemingly infinite roofs of apartment buildings and other small structures.
Having a panoramic format plates gave me a chance to get everything in one frame, while generally all my images focused just on the back yard that is directly in front of my stairwell. Fitting it all in actually proved a bit tougher than I thought it would, but after a while I was able to do so with the aid of an 8x10in camera and a 90mm Nikkor-W lens. This view is looking almost directly to the south, so no matter the time of day, if it's sunny it's really high in contrast. Despite that, my tintypes always seemed to have full shadow detail while holding the highlights without blowing them out. Collodion and daguerreotype mediums are reputed to have about the same light spectrum sensitivity, purportedly being sensitive mainly to UV and blue wavelengths. A good deal of discussion of various methods aimed at extending this sensitivity range in daguerreotypes can be found in writings both old and new. Achieving detail in green or red foliage is said to benefit from this trick or that. Other efforts focus on controlling contrast, which is normally thought of as being too high to hold more than a few stops of light. In my previous practices, I've noticed that with a decently fumed and exposed plate I didn't seem to have those issues, and so when I saw that back yard image by Mr. Nelson, and the discussion around it, I was very much curious about how well I can capture my 'not my back yard' scene in full afternoon sunlight and not very open shadows. It took me a couple of tries, but below is the resulting daguerreotype image, on 22-gauge solid silver plate, followed by an completely unedited image made with an iPhone 15 just about 10min after the daguerreotype was captured (thus the shadow changing a bit between the two images). In order to make the comparison easier, I flipped the iPhone image left to right.
Having the one 23-gauge plate left, I waited for inspiration once again, and this time it came to me in a dream. During those wonderful afternoon naps, when the brain drifts in and out of sleep, short but vivid dreams seem to play hopscotch between my eyes and cranium. In one such fleeting yet warm vision I felt I was a kind of a mystical broker, overseeing allegorical negotiations between a feather and a thistle. Our offers of peace were being largely stonewalled, but hope never faded. After a few days in the darkroom and studio, the image below came to be.
This is the beginning of what I plan to be a long-running series called Daguerreian Dreamscapes. I plan on all of images being on solid silver plates and 6x3in in size, and, as mentioned above, next plate is on the way to me now. I eagerly await whatever compelling imagery my subliminal realms unveil to me.
Anton