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| Casanave, untitled, 2012 |
Martha's been using a camera for fifty years - for teaching, for portraiture, for staged photography, for essays on artists and writers of the former Soviet Union, the list goes on. Another equally important part of her work during this period has involved specialized cameras: pinholes, large format cameras, nineteenth century contraptions, wherever her heart directs her. To my mind Martha's finest book remains the amazing pinhole odyssey entitled
Explorations Along an Imaginary Coastline, which is essential reading.
But at times she dispenses with the camera altogether and creates pictures which readers of this blog are familiar with, if not practitioners themselves: lumens, glassprints (Martha sticks by the term cliché-verre and we'll follow her on this), and chemigrams. Today we want to look at a group of her cliché-verres from 2012, but first we must set the stage.
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| Casanave, untitled, 2012 |
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| Casanave, untitled, 2012 |
Let's step back and see how we got here. W. H. Fox Talbot, around 1835, made a few drawings by setting botanical materials on glass plates. He wanted to see if he could print these images onto paper sensitized with a coating of silver salts. He could. Since sunlight was the driving force, he called them 'photogenic drawings' or drawings arising from light. A few months after he got around to announcing this feat, in 1839, three Englishmen, apparently etchers or engravers, applied for a patent on a process to make a 'glass print' by drawing with etching needles on sooted glass and printing it on sensitized paper. It was an improvement on Talbot and a legal tussle may have ensued over the rights, we don't know for sure. What we do know is that the process was never commercialized, and quietly died. The three Englishmen returned to their etching.
Across the Channel, a Frenchman by the name of Adalbert Cuvelier, an amateur painter and skilled photographer (photography was booming by the 1850s), invented basically the same process in 1853 and called it cliché-verre (who knew it was a
zombie process?) He lived in a rural area and had a friend nearby who was a painter too and loved to paint landscapes. His name was Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot. Corot wanted to learn this new technology, seeing in it a way to do quick sketches from nature which later could be printed, then recast as paintings: a transfer process basically. Cuvelier was happy to show it to him, and he showed it as well to Corot's circle of painter and printmaker friends - Millet, Delacroix, Rousseau and others - who had begun leaving Paris for the more aesthetically pleasing countryside and forests of Barbizon, south of Arras where Cuvelier lived. Soon the forests were teeming with artists carrying around sooted glass plates, scouting for scenic views, idyllic streams, stoic peasants. We are in the heyday of cliché-verre, roughly from 1860 to 1875. Incredibly, many of these glass plates survive today and can still be contact-printed.
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| Corot, Souvenir d'Ostie, cliché-verre, 1855 |
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| Casanave, untitled, 2012 |
A rapid succession of technological breakthroughs brought this period to a close, along with possibly - we speculate - a certain ennui of the forests and a yearning for the café life of Paris. First, gelatin dry-plate photography was invented in 1871 to supplant the older, cumbersome, wet-plate process; George Eastman established a company to exploit it, and it now became much easier to photograph a landscape instead of painstakingly drawing it on a plate. Cameras themselves became smaller, cheaper and simpler. Eastman introduced photographic film, and in 1888 a small portable camera, the Kodak; a more revolutionary technology for the general public was not seen until Steve Jobs' iPhone more than a century later. Cliché-verres by now, amazingly, were soon a relic.
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| Casanave, untitled, 2012 |
For the next hundred years and merging with our times, most of the history of cliché-verre has been one of scarcely more than flirtation and curiosity, associated occasionally with hot-button names like Klee, Picasso, Man Ray etc, but with no enduring commitment from anyone. Each dabbled, did one or two, and moved on. Roland Barthes discusses some of the reasons in his book
The Neutral: Lecture Course at the Collège de France (1977-78) but I warn you if you go there it's buried deeply. However, as in all things there are exceptions. I have my favorites among the modern or modernish cliché-verre artists and I return to their work often: I find it passionate and overlooked. The list must include Hajek-Halke and Chargesheimer in postwar Germany and
Aris Koutroulis and
Abelardo Morell in America, the latter two both discussed elsewhere on this blog. (Two other Americans often cited, Henry Holmes Smith and Frederick Sommer, I will pass over in strict silence.)
And then there is Martha Casanave.
What moving, mysterious, wonderful pictures these are. They wake you up, you who've been sleepwalking through the galleries of contemporary photography. They lie well beyond representation, even beyond structure, but not beyond poetry. They are calm, profound, and intricately rational like a microscope slide of a human cell, but a cell no one has ever seen before. How does she manage to pull it off?
She switches from poetry to prose to help us understand. "I smoke pieces of glass with a candle. You can do varying densities of smoke, and varying shapes, depending on how you hold the glass. Then I drop alcohol on it. I sometimes use just water. No predicting how it will look of course. If I don't like it, I just wash it off and start again. I don't save any of these 'negatives'. I make 8x10" prints in the darkroom. I scan some, and make big digital prints."
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| Casanave, untitled, 2012 |
Corot would have understood her, if you take out the digital. The two of them could have smoked their glass over the same candle.
Her website is www.marthacasanave.com
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