Portrait of the Artist as an Old-Timey Woman

Last Sunday, I felt like I spent the afternoon in the laboratory of a mad scientist.  But this mad scientist happens to be one of the nicest, most grounded guys you could meet.  Daniel Carrillo, known to many Seattlites as the curator and co-founder of Some Space Gallery, as well as the creator of a surreal body of mezzotints, has recently taken to producing photographic portraits using an arcane and labor-intensive process known as wet-plate collodion ambrotype.  The process, which requires its subjects to remain motionless under extremely bright lighting conditions for extremely long exposure times—some of mine took over thirty seconds!—produces photographic images directly onto glass plates. The images themselves look like something out of the nineteenth century, but the way Carrillo captures his subjects is entirely his own.

Daniel Carrillo. Portrait of Emily Pothast. Wet-plate collodion ambrotype, 2010.

So far, Dan has been honing his skills by photographing a growing cross-section of the Seattle visual art community at his Georgetown studio—Sharon Arnold, Robert Hardgrave, Shaun Kardinal, Brian Lane, Steven Miller and Erin Frost have all watched new sides of themselves emerge under Carrillo’s lens.  Check out his Flicker Photostream to keep tabs on this project.

~ by emilypothast on January 16, 2010.