Darkroom denizens in the spotlight
Calgary shutterbugs go old-school
Stop the (digital) revolution. A group of young Calgary photographers-turned-magazine-publishers want to get off.
That would be Sanja Lukac, Francis A. Willey and Kirsten White, the trio behind Seities, a new photography magazine dedicated purely to traditional photographs shot on film, developed in a dark room — with environmentally friendly developer — that takes the old ways and transforms them into a new way of creating 21st-century images.
Like vinyl records, or folk pop bands such as the Lumineers or Mumford and Sons who are rediscovering old sounds and giving them a new spin, a new generation of photographers have embraced traditional photography, lobbing around terms like wet plate, amber-type and Polaroid as if it were 1973, not 2013.
For Lukac, who landed in Calgary as a refugee from the Yugoslavian civil war in the early 1990s, studied at the Alberta College of Art and Design, and has shot for everyone from Italian Vogue to Swerve, the appeal of traditional photography lies in its universality.
“It’s one of the most beautiful languages in the world,” she says. “Everyone, if they have sight, they can see these messages you’re trying to portray.”
What’s surprising is that there are a lot of closet traditional photographers out there.
“There’s real enthusiasm (for traditional photography),” Lukac says. “Even in Calgary, just saying the words film or dark room or wet plates — it’s like a hidden vocabulary.
“Their (other traditional photographers’) ears perk up (when they overhear you use those words),” she adds. “Speaking my language?”
The magazine came about partly as a result of Willey and Lukac’s travels through the art and fashion and design world.
Willey is a traditional photographer who shoots (exclusively on film) for magazines such as Italian Vogue, Flare, and in places such as New York, Lisbon, Switzerland and South America — in addition to such local publications as Swerve and the Calgary Herald.
“We would meet different artists through (the) international (traditional photography) community,” he says, “and then we came up with an idea — why don’t we come up with a publication that celebrates (traditional photography), from plate to Polaroid? Exclusively.”
The magazine, which is planned as a biannual affair, provides a landing place for a group of artists spread around the planet. The publishers received submissions from places such as Poland, Colorado, Iowa, Vancouver, rural Alberta and elsewhere — practising traditional photography, says Lukac.
“There is such an international community and they are so proud of everything that they actually have obtained this knowledge,” she says, “and can create this way, and exhibit this way, and document events this way — but they don’t really have a (media) home.
“There’s things like Facebook,” she adds, “or blogs where they can share, but there’s no publication that’s exclusively for those processes.” Enter Seities. “It’s to promote the artists who are creating this way,” she says, “and encourage the ones who are kind of dabbling in it to give them some inspiration to it through our interviews and studio visits and for theme submissions, just sort of inspiring people that they can do this (too).” And that obscure name? “Seities is a noun,” she says. “It’s an English word, and it means personal identity. And it’s also the same forwards as backwards — it’s kind of a theme — a palindrome. It’s one of those words that mirrors itself, which is a theme in the publication, just the esthetic of it.”
And while launching a magazine is no small deal — particularly in a digital media 21st-century economy — Lukac and Willey have also, along the way come up with a new environmentallyfriendly developing technique that they call Verdant Luminol, or The Stimulant.
“With this product,” says Lukac, “where it is good for your health — you can basically drink the developer.”
“Not that you’d want to,” says Willey.
“It doesn’t taste very good,” says Lukac.
“We want to teach other people to use it,” she adds. “We don’t have any chemistry in our dark room — it’s less toxic, so it’s more inviting.”
It turns out that while traditional photography has its nostalgic appeal, the truth, for those very first photographers, back around 1837, was much darker.
It turns out part of the ingredients of the first film developer were highly carcinogenic mercury vapours.
“Early photographers, when they started out,” says Lukac, “had about a decade left to their careers.”
Things improved over the ensuing century and a half, but even in the 21st century, Willey says working with chemical developer took a significant toll on his health.
“We were both affected,” says Willey. “If you saw me three years ago, everybody asked me if I went skiing — because my skin was always peeling and red.”
Until a couple years ago, when, working with Bruce Hildesheim, Lukac and Willey, using a variety of organic ingredients — developed environmentallyfriendly developer that they have since tweaked to the point where it consistently produces high-quality prints.
“I was able to make a museum (quality) print,” says Willey. “And it’s made with this process, so it’s very exciting.”
It’s all happening in conjunction with the 2013 Exposure Photography Festival, a month-long festival dedicated to all things photographic, whether traditional, digital or otherwise.
The launch is taking place at another new kind of traditional retail outlet — the Old School Emporium in Mount Royal Village, a family-run grocery featuring locally-grown fare, old-time cash registers and scales and one of its most popular items — a collection of exquisite straight-edged razors and shaving brushes that appear to have been pulled from the set of one of those old 1970s Kris Kristofferson westerns about Billy the Kid.
It would seem that for every great new smartphone app out there, there is a new generation of young artists longing for the days when phones were dumb and needed to be dialed.
“People are revert- ing back to that now, in every possible way,” says Willey, who is also an accomplished poet and pianist. “They’ll try to make a gimmick kind of thing that emulates something from the past — (for example), the iPhone case that looks a cassette tape.
“It’s happening everywhere,” Lukac says. “in every medium.”