The Daily Slice: Your Portrait By the Year 1851

The world is overflowing with beautiful and interesting things competing for our attention, and if you live in the real world, it’s a tall task to include appreciating the hell out of art on a daily basis. Really, who can find the time? That’s why Guy.com offers a “daily slice.” It’s a small taste of what’s going on in the world of art and design–something we find beautiful or inspiring or worthy of a peek. We’re happy to serve it up.

Jody Ake

© Jody Ake

There are so many camera apps for our mobile phones that now anyone can be a contemporary photographer. We have tools available to us that simulate complicated photographic processes in mere minutes at the tip of our fingers. Take one photo, add a filter, and suddenly your photo looks like a polaroid from 1974. Add another, and it’s a high-contrast black and white. You can even turn your photograph into a sketch without even picking up a pencil. The availability of these tools and the immediacy of the results has removed us far from the precious nature of the chemical process of photography on film and paper.

© Jody Ake

It used to be, if someone took your picture, you’d sit for minutes at a time while light bounced off of your form and face and slowly changed the chemicals on a photographic plate. You couldn’t move, you shouldn’t blink, and you wouldn’t have bothered to smile. The equipment was bulky, it was time consuming, and many of the chemicals couldn’t be stored for the next use.

Portland photographer Jody Ake uses a photographic technique developed in 1851 to shoot his portrait subjects as well as landscapes, still lifes, and fashion photography. He uses a “wet collodion” process which entails hand-mixing a special chemical cocktail which is then painted onto a glass plate. While the plate is still wet, it is mounted into a giant camera and the “shot” (which is more like a “sitting”) takes place.

© Jody Ake

Ake is one of only a few contemporary photographers that chooses to use this antique process to capture images. The results are profound. Modern clothing and hair styles face back at us as we peer through the muck of the image. The portrait subject’s hard stare is often caught in high contrast, while the rest of the form softens and seems to slip back into visual oblivion, giving the subject the qualities of an apparition. The imperfect edges of the photographs are most likely due to the drying of the chemicals around the edges first, which affects the exposure of the image onto the plate.

© Jody Ake

Ake returns our images to a physical process once again, and releases us back into the long history of what it takes for us to be able to save images of ourselves to share. Today, especially, his work is relevant. Facebook users upload over 3 billion photographs each month. Billion. We share photographs with each other as they happen. Our photographic memories are precious to us, otherwise we wouldn’t want to share them; but the photographs themselves are not. In fact, the readily accessible networks for sharing our images make it easy for us to share images that no one cares about! It’s become a disposable process. Ake’s work brings photography back to when images were one-of-a-kind objects to be curated, collected, and preserved.

© Jody Ake

The intimacy of his work reminds us of the truth that only a flawed chemical process can capture. Light doesn’t lie, and neither does science. The results are fascinating.

See more of his work HERE