Week 1- Deadpan Portraiture & The Wet Collodion Process

During this week I learnt about deadpan portraiture and a method in which it was used called the wet collodian process

Deadpan is something which is purposely impassive and has a lack of expression. In this case it is applied to a subject in a photograph however it can also be referred to in many other study areas such as in music where you could have a 'deadpan tone'. The reason in which they look so gloomy in the photographs is due to the long exposure times of an image. The subject will tend to appear detached however the image will be sharp and have clarity.

A good example of deadpan portraiture is the work of Walker Evans who is seen to be a forefather of deadpan documentary. Below is a photography of his of a women called Allie Mae Burroughs.


He is well known for working during the depression years of 1935-36 doing something known as straight photography. Straight photography is photography that attempts to show the scene as realistically as possible without manipulation of lighting and such. Evans describes his work as "literate, authoritative, transcendent".




I am interested in his work for the fact he uses real day people and documents what he sees not what he wants us to see. I also like that he uses available light as aspose to studio lighting as i feel it takes alot more skill.

We did our own deadpan imagery however we did this using strong studio lighting when taking the image. We used the wet collodian process, this is an old darkroom process in which u take the image on a piece of glass. The steps in how to do this are in the web line below:

http://www.alternativephotography.com/wp/processes/wetplate/the-wetplate-collodion-process

After following all of those steps we finally produced a successful image shown below:

Sources:
 http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/evan/hd_evan.htm

Book: The photograph as contemporary art, Charlotte Cotton, Chapter 3:Deadpan

Book: Walker Evans, Aperture masters of photography, number 10, Copyright 1993 aperture foundation ink.