Arkansas Momentos

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Calotype Negative - 2022

My vision for this collection of images is to re-trace my early experiences in photographic labs with my own film photography as a journalist and industrial photographer in the 1970s and 1980s.

If you have been in a darkroom, the luminous glow of a wet 8x10 Extrachrome transparency or a B&W image rising in Dektol - these are almost magical experiences - difficult to recreate in digital methods. And unless you have held an ambrotype on glass or examined a Civil War-era gutta-percha case with a hand-painted tintype, the notion to engage in historical photographic methods in the 21st century may seem like so much folly.

The Old Icehouse Building, 500 S. Arkansas Street, Rogers AR. Mural by english artist Richard Simmons, curated by Alejo Benedetti of Crystal Bridges.

Calotype image made with Roger Sassaki, September 2022