Handmade Photography Today Symposium

11 am – 5 pm

Collins Cinema, Davis Lobby, Davis Plaza, and Galleries

In conjunction with the exhibition, Making, Not Taking: Portrait Photography in the 19th Century, the Davis Museum presents a day-long symposium to explore contemporary iterations of nineteenth-century photographic processes. From photograms to platinum prints, alternative approaches to automatic point-and-shoot and digital photography have spiked among professional and amateur photographers around the globe in recent years. The boom in what Lyle Rexer has termed “the antiquarian avant-garde” is in part a reaction to the supposedly desensitized nature of digital photography, but it should also be understood in the context of a more widespread turn to the materials, process, and event of photography as a site of knowledge. We will hear from four acclaimed photographers working in nineteenth-century processes: Myra Greene (ambrotypes), Will Wilson (tintypes), Edie Bresler (cyanotypes), and Takashi Arai (daguerreotypes) production.  The speakers will investigate how the specific material conditions of early photographic formats have the potential to inform and produce alternative understandings of our contemporary relationship to historical imagery.

Free and open to the public; advanced registration available on eventbrite

Co-hosted with the Photographic Resource Center

Generously sponsored by the Bern Schwartz Family Foundation