Photography from the fringes
Potentially deadly process brings artist's subjects to life

By Brandon Griggs, Salt Lake Tribune March 19, 2006

As a boy, Quinn Jacobson made regular visits to a low-income apartment complex his father owned in Ogden, where the tenants were ex-cons, alcoholics, drug addicts, elderly eccentrics and the mentally ill.

Some kids would have been repulsed, but Jacobson was fascinated. To him, these people represented an exotic world far from the streets of suburban Ogden where he grew up. Their weathered faces and hard-luck stories stayed with him into adulthood, long after he became a photographer and artist.

 "I've tried to do landscapes. I've tried to do still lifes. And my camera comes back to these people, always," says Jacobson, who had his own struggles with drugs and alcohol as a teenager. "I've been preoccupied with this for 20 years. I'm looking for characteristics of hardship and adversity."

 Jacobson found them in a group of felons, AIDS patients, amputees, construction workers, addicts and disaffected teens, chronicled in a striking series of photographs now on display at Art Access Gallery in Salt Lake City. The show is titled "Portraits From Madison Avenue" after the location of the Ogden apartment building, but its hardscrabble human subjects

	"Kayla," by Quinn Jacobson.

come from throughout Weber County and beyond. The images explore themes of identity, memory and social class.

Jacobson is not the first art photographer to shoot portraits of people fighting to survive on the fringes of mainstream society. But he's one of the few to make those images using a rare and dangerous 19th-century process that almost all photographers gave up 120 years ago.

This antiquated method, wet-plate collodion photography, was invented in 1851 and discarded by the 1880s, when dry plates were invented. Tricky and time-consuming, the process requires its practitioners to make exposures by hand on cut-glass plates treated with hazardous chemicals. The resulting images look like something from an earlier century.

 "I've had people walk up to my photos and say, 'Where did you find these?' " says Jacobson, who learned photography in the Army. "I think, 'What do you mean?' And then it dawns on me - they think I dug them out of an archive."

Jacobson's images, imprinted on glass plates, have a distinctively weathered, murky look. His subjects stare unsmilingly at the camera in the manner of 19th-century long-exposure

	Photographer Quinn Jacobson in his studio.

photographs. The edges of the image often are smudged or rippled, adding to the rough-hewn effect.

"In this type of photography, you see so well the human touch," says Ruth Lubbers, director of Art Access, where Jacobson's photos will remain through April 14. "You see the imperfections. You even can see [Jacobson's] fingerprints in some of them."

The exhibition is Jacobson's first solo gallery show after a long career as a newspaper photographer. After earning a photography degree from Weber State University, he shot for the Standard-Examiner in Ogden and the Park Record in Park City, work that deepened his appreciation for documenting real people and their lives.

Like most photographers, Jacobson has forsaken film for digital images in his day job as a photographer for Hill Air Force Base. But the pristine digital process left him cold. So in 2003, when Jacobson saw some wet-plate collodion images in a book, he was intrigued. Within months, he had completed an intensive week of training in Rochester, N.Y., under Mark and France Osterman, modern masters of the wet-plate process.
 "It resonated with me deeply," he says. "I'm not anti-digital. But there's something soul-satisfying about mixing your own chemicals, cutting your own glass and making your own prints. It's such a commitment."

The process is so laborious that only a tiny cult of photographers, most notably Sally Mann, practice it. From start to finish, making a single exposure can take hours. The big, boxy camera weighs 50 pounds. And then there are the risks posed by the chemicals.

Collodion, a syrupy liquid, is relatively harmless. But wet-plate photography requires silver nitrate, which can cause blindness, and cyanide, which can be fatal even in minute doses. The history of the medium includes documented cases of photographers reaching for the wrong bottle and dying instantly from cyanide poisoning.
 Once he learned the basics of the process, Jacobson began looking for people to photograph. He ignored conventional-looking types for faces etched with pain and misfortune, many of them working stiffs who overcame initial discomfort to blossom before Jacobson's lens. One, Merrym, lost her right leg to a flesh-eating virus. Another, Dusty, is a disabled janitor whom Jacobson dressed as a prisoner to symbolize the limitations society places on him.

"For some of them, [being photographed] is a very profound experience," says Jacobson, who approaches people on the street and asks them to pose. "A lot of the people I photograph say they see something in themselves they've never seen before."
 That's a result of the wet-plate collodion process, which produces ghostly images fraught with menace and mystery. As Jacobson says, "Collodion has its own story to tell." He believes the process reveals qualities in its subjects that traditional photography cannot. And he views the "Madison Avenue" portraits as a perfect marriage between his creative method and his choice of subjects.

"Wet-plate collodion is a discarded, forgotten process. And I feel like the people I'm photographing have been discarded and forgotten, too," he says. "I'm fascinated by this tension between how they see themselves and how we see them . . . by this whole question of 'normalcy.' Although some of these images are grotesque, they are still beautiful people in my mind."
griggs@sltrib.com
   
   
Life on the margins
   
"Portraits from Madison Avenue," wet-plate collodion photographs by Quinn Jacobson, will be on display through April 14 at Art Access Gallery, 339 W. Pierpont Ave., Salt Lake City. The show includes almost three dozen images plus tools that Jacobson uses in his work. Gallery hours are Monday through Friday, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.
   
Jacobson also will give a free demonstration at the gallery on Saturday at 2 p.m. Attendance is limited; call 801-328-0703.