First launched in 2013, The Experimental Condition is dedicated to presenting new approaches to the medium of photography. Photographic experimentation, the blending of unlikely materials to produce new photographic processes and new photographic devices is a permanent feature in photography’s history. The tradition of experimentations continues into the present day with computer programs, silicon, and…
Infrared Street Photographs
With the invention of photography in the 19th century, photographers opened the spectacle of the natural world to the scientific community and to an awestruck public. After the introduction of faster dry plate emulsions, photography as a tool for research of unseen realities extended scientific knowledge beyond the observable, and photography routinely presented the previously…
St. Kilda—Nature, the Sublime, the Picturesque
The term nature evokes mountains, waterfalls, deep forests, and Ansel Adam’s landscape photographs. This popular association of nature with beautiful outdoor splendor began in the 16th and 17th centuries. The landscaped gardens of the British and French aristocracy, which emphasized the precise control of nature, were an early expression of burgeoning nature and landscape consciousness. The rise…
At Lacock Abbey: Talbot’s Latticed Window
In early June 2022, I toured Lacock Abbey, the large ancestral home of William Henry Fox Talbot, the inventor of the negative-positive photographic process. The highlight of the tour was the opportunity to look through the latticed window in the south gallery of Lacock Abbey, the subject of one of the world’s first camera-generated photographs….
Lumen Prints: Wildflowers
Camera-less photographs occupy an important yet underappreciated place in the history of photography. While still considered an experimental medium, the photogram, or camera-less image is a photograph produced by the action of light on a light-sensitive surface without the aid of a camera and lens. Camera-less photographs engage the core of the photographic process —…
Photographing at the Sage Crest Drive-in
The first commercial drive-in movie theatre in the United States opened in 1933, just outside of Camden, New Jersey. In the car-centric late 1950s, drive-in theatres became very popular and reached a peak of over 4000 drive-in movie screens, nationwide in 1958. [1] One of the largest drive-in movie theatres featured spaces for 2500 cars,…
Varanasi Streets | the ProCam App
The cameraphone merges the most important communication devices in the history of the planet—the telephone, the camera, and the internet. The camera phone or smartphone concept has dramatically reshaped expectations of photography and the look and feel of the camera. Camera phone conventions appeared in 1988, and the first wireless camera phone prototype appeared in…
At Spenceville, Reflections in an Ephemeral Pond
In early January 2022, I had a chance to experiment with photographing reflections in an ephemeral pond in the Spenceville Wildlife Refuge in the Sierra Nevada Foothills of Northern California. After heavy December and January rains, seasonal streams were flowing and ponds were full. I was treated to a still morning and clear skies, perfect…
Relics, In A Gold Country
That the past is different from the present is its foremost attraction. We know about the past through history, memory, and relics. Photography is critical in shaping our knowledge of the past, as a physical record of the past, as a stimulus to memory, and through the creation of visual artifacts of the past.[1] The…
Experimenting with Infrared Full-Spectrum Photography
Early 19th-century photography was only able to record light falling in the blue and the ultraviolet portion of the electromagnetic spectrum. This very limited spectral range is best seen in the blank white skies in landscape photography in the mid-19th century. [1] By the 1880s and following the addition of sensitizing dyes to silver gelatin…
Experimenting with Lens Blur: the Burnside 35mm Lens
Humans see binocularly, whereas a camera lens records light with only one light source—monocularly establishing a single point of focus. The photographer chooses a single point of focus, giving emphasis and meaning to the image. By adjusting the focus in the image, a photographer can establish a hierarchy of focus and attention over the image….
Edward Weston—At the Oceano Dunes
Edward Weston — The Thing Itself Photography in the decades just after the First World War joined modernist innovations underway in architecture, painting, sculpture, and literature. Modernist photography embraced an aesthetic of simplification, stripping away ornamentation to reveal the texture of paint or stone, to expose the steel structures of buildings, and distilling form to…
Locating Dorothea Lange’s Migrant Mother
Social Documentary Photography / Farm Security Administration The term documentary is of relatively recent origin, first appearing about 1900, and was loosely used by film critic John Grierson in 1926. This term is now applied to a particular response in photography and film to the cultural upheavals following World War I and into the present…
Negative Portraits In Silver
In a box of photographs collected at junk stores, I discovered a long-forgotten package of silver gelatin dry plate portraits. Likely created in the early 20th century, the photographer, the location, creation dates, and the subjects of the photographs are unknown. These many unknown only add to the haunting visual qualities of these silver gelatin…
British Cemeteries in the Ganges Valley, India
The British East India Company was formed by royal charter in 1600 for the profitable exploitation of trade with India and Asia. Acting as an agent for the British government and through monopolies on the importation of cotton, tea, silk, and other fabrics from India into Britain, the company became a catalyst for British expansion…
Found Photograph, Varanasi, a Story.
Experimental photography asks questions: What is it? What process was used? But most importantly, what is a photograph? Some of the first responses to photography spoke of the magical powers of the photograph to capture traces of the world with unbelievable accuracy. Something of the divine seemed to appear in the first photographs, and early…
Diana, Return to Hong Kong
With a population of 7.5 million people crammed into 686 square miles, Hong Kong is one of the most densely populated cities in the world. With its harbors, skyline, mountains, islands, beaches, fogs, subtropical climate, and unique blend of European and Chinese cultures, Hong Kong is one of the most beautiful and vibrant cities in…
Northern Lights, High ISO
Northern Lights are always occurring, however, they are only viewable when lower levels of light pollution occur, and typically on clear nights in September through April in the Northern Hemisphere. The aurora borealis and aurora australis, the northern or southern lights, are caused by particles escaping from the sun, a phenomenon known as solar wind into space. The…
Matching Color From a Vintage Stereo Card
The stereo camera coupled with the stereoscope is one of the 19th century’s most unique inventions. The stereography extended the visual reach of photography and unlike any other photographic process or invention, through the vivid illusion of three-dimensionality, “captured the visual essence of nature.”[1] In the presentation above, I demonstrate how to use Photoshop’s Match…
Mission San Xavier del Bac and Color IR Film
Mission San Xavier del Bac is located about 10 miles south of Tucson, Arizona. Founded in 1692 by Eusebio Francisco Kino, the Mission was the last settlement in a chain of Jesuit missions in the Sonoran Desert. Setting just a few miles west of Interstate 19, the church is an active parish and pilgrimage site…
The Little Brown Dog, Chewed Film, Man Ray.
So I have a little brown dog (Elliot). Eliot is a great dog, my constant companion, a great photo-buddy who jumps to attention whenever I pick up a camera or tripod. However, sometimes he reverts to his puppy personality and chews up clothing, shoes, blankets. Several years ago, he grabbed a roll of 120mm film…
Death Valley, Painted Landscapes
The mediums of painting and photography have intersected at many times. With the invention of photography, painters began to work from photographs. Eugene Delacroix created nude studies based on daguerreotype photographs by Eugene Durieu. Praising the effects of photography, Delacroix wrote in 1850 “A daguerreotype is the mirror of the object, certain details almost always…
Shooting Out-of-Date Film
Shooting and processing out-of-date film engage the core of experimental photography. Part chance, part experience, part research, processing old film engages new approaches to photography through trial and error. After the adoption of the 35mm film width in 1909 as the international standard gauge for movie picture systems, 35mm still cameras were introduced to exploit…
Portraits, Jesuit-Guaraní Sculptures
After first establishing a mission at San Ignacio Guazú, Paraguay, in 1609, the Society of the Jesuits would go on to build 30 mission settlements called reductions among the Guaraní people in the fertile river valleys of the Parana and Uruguay Rivers, a region today spanning the countries of Southern Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, and Paraguay. [1]…
Statuary Portraits, Recoleta Cemetery, Buenos Aires, Argentina
Designed by a French engineer Próspero Catelin, the Recoleta Cemetery is Buenos Aire’s most compelling tourist attraction. Mirroring the sprawling metropolis outside the large stonewalls of the Recoleta, over 6,400 statues, stone coffins, and burial vaults are crammed into the labyrinthine 14-acre cemetery. Opened in 1822, tall concrete, marble, and black granite mausoleums in every…
Luminances, the Ceramic Portraits of the Recoleta Cemetery, Asunción, Paraguay
Angel, Recoleta Cemetery, Asunción, Paraguay Photographs possess the remarkable ability to close distances of time and space and bring forward the person, place, or thing which stood before the lens. Referred to as “photography’s transparency,” this quality remains photography’s most distinctive feature.[1] In 1843, shortly after the appearance of the first photographs, Victorian poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning…