 |
| Marble Torso of a Boy, Tod Gangler (used with permission of the artist) |
Art & Soul Photography Gallery through April
2860 Market Street, Seattle
9 am to 5 pm, Monday through Friday
About five years ago a friend said to me, “Art & Soul
Photography is the best place in Seattle to have your work photographed.” “Okay”, I said, “I’ll check it out.” The
problem was I couldn’t find it the first time I went looking. There is no sign
outside the modest, white building located just north of Taco Time near the
Ballard locks. The sign is there
but it’s located in the window below eye level. I persisted and was hugely rewarded for my efforts. That’s
because the real story here is about a very talented photographer named Tod Gangler
and a rare process called carbon color printing.
Tod himself is an unassuming man who wears comfy cardigan sweaters
and is likely to remind you of your favorite college professor. His passion is
revealed when you ask him about photography and carbon printing.
Tod discovered photography at the age of six when he
received his first camera. His discovery of carbon printing would have to wait
until 1975, after graduation from Conneticuit College, and his arrival in Paris
on a Thomas J. Watson Fellowship (he stayed in France for five years). Once
there he came across an exhibition of photographic prints at the Bibliothèque Nationale from the mid-1800s.
He was galvanized by the vibrant clarity yet subtle tonal shifts that remained
after 140 years. This was especially important to someone like Tod who has always
desired a perfect image. Here they were!
Carbon
printing was originally developed in 1855 by Alphonse Poitevin as
a solution to problems with fugitive images then being created by traditional
print photography. Color was
introduced to the process in 1869 through the use of a pigmented gelatin.
Individual layers were printed, one on top of the other, much like a
traditional printmaking process. The result is “the most permanent of all
photography processes” according to Tod.
Back in Paris, Tod was honored when the Bibliothèque Nationale
purchased of a set photographs he had taken at Sainte Chapelle. This was done
on the condition they be printed by the Fresson family, who has been making
color carbon prints for artists since the late 19th century. The
exclusivity of their process required that Tod’s work again be reviewed and
accepted. Once this hurdle was
cleared, Tod was allowed to visit the Fresson studio over the course of several
months while his work was printed. This was another significant honor because at
the time the Fresson's business was the only one making color carbon prints. As a
result they were very secretive about their process, recipes and the technical
aspects of printing.
If you were fortunate enough to have been in the Art &
Soul Photography Gallery over the past few months you were able to view a
series of stunning carbon color prints by Tod. “I'd
always wanted to make a series of photographs of the human body, and for years
I studied what other photographers had already done while I considered what I
could add to this primal subject.” He had begun to doubt that the series would
ever come together but finally “the right confluence of model, meaning or
light . . . that overcame either the
deadly traps of cliché or the flesh and sex dominated vision of our ever more
commercial and materialistic society’ appeared when he returned to the Louve, a
place he had visited weekly while living in Paris.
Never much of a fan of classical art Tod decided give it
another shot. While at the Louvre he wandered into the remodeled classical sculpture galleries. "I was
surprised," he told me, "to see all the ideas and forms of my unrealized figure series there
before me in carved marble." That was the beginning. The result is a
series of photographs that stopped me in my tracks every time I went into the
gallery during the winter. The
warm tones of the marble statutes, scared over
the years during periods of religious fervor that caused people to attack
the
statutes, shine through and they remain beautiful. The
photographs capture the form of the figure in a way that projects their human
presence and dignity. The images are all taken straight on
from
the front, “tourist-style” says Tod, who snapped the shots without his
usual attention
to composition and lighting. Rather he deferred to his instincts. It
wasn’t
until he returned to his studio that he began to realize something
special had
happened with the casual shot combined with the natural light. Together
with carbon color printing the result is a series of stunning, painterly
photographs.
 |
| Christ, Tod Ganger (used with permission of the artist) |
So what will you
find in the gallery today, and through the month of May? There is a new series of photographs by Tod
depicting beautiful, old statues of Jesus and Mary that were taken on a trip to
Oaxaca, Mexican. “For the last three years I've been practicing color
photography the way that it was invented in 1869 in France: three separate
black and white pictures are taken of the same subject, with each picture being
taken through a different colored filter. In this way, each of the three pictures
records some color information of the original scene, but in a black and white
negative. The three black and white negatives are then used to expose three colored
gelatin relief emulsions that are combined together to recreate the full color
scene in my print."
The
Art & Soul Gallery will be open for the Ballard Art Walk the
second Saturday of each month beginning in May through September. In the
meantime, you can view the current exhibit from 9-5 week days. Oh, and Art & Soul is arguable the best place in the city to have your paintings documented.
___
Todd answered some additional questions, which you can find here.
No comments:
Post a Comment