A workshop covering the history of photo development processes will be held at the museum in the state capital on Saturday, March 23. The deadline to register for the class at the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts is Friday, March 22.
The event website states, “Consideration of how a once intimate image viewing experience has been transformed for the distribution of countless numbers of images online will occur.”
Will Fenn, a professor of photography at the Auburn University at Montgomery, will lead the course at the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts, which is open to anyone over the age of 17.
“This will be a combination of art history and hands on photography work,” said Kaylee Hobbs, the manager of adult programs for the museum. “Will is planning to discuss the history of photography, and how it's changed over time.”
A working camera phone will be required to participate in the workshop. Participants will learn about different historical techniques of photo rendering, and they will also be taught how to make silver gelatin prints.
“If you don't know what silver gelatin prints are, that's fine,” said Hobbs “It was developed in the 1870s. This process involves two layers of substrate, or foundation of paper, and an emulsion of silver salt and gelatin, which creates a light sensitive top layer. We'll be doing that, as well as creating photographs that our participants can share on social media.”
According to the National Gallery of Art (NGA), William Henry Fox Talbot introduced the basic chemical process in 1839, but the more complex gelatin silver process did not become the most common method of printing black-and-white photographs until the late 1910s.
The NGA also reports that from the 1880s through the turn of the twentieth century, Alfred Stieglitz published articles about his experiments with early silver papers in which the image was printed out, or made visible through exposure to light. From the early 1920s through 1937, he printed on a variety of commercial developing-out gelatin silver papers. The surfaces of his prints range from matte to glossy.
The upcoming workshop at the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts will also cover modern forms of photo rendering, including AI generative images. Artists who utilize AI, such as Charlie Engman and Bennett Miller, will also be covered.
“As for the discussion of AI photography, it will be touched upon in the workshop,” said Fenn. “We will discuss what constitutes a photograph, and whether light must be used in the creation of an image in order for it to be called a photo.”
There are only 20 studio spots available for the workshop. The deadline to sign up for the class is Friday, March 22. More information about the workshop can be found here.
