Looking back
Stephen Berkman’s work leaves viewers in awe of pre-Digital Age photography
By Jana J. Monji 10/23/2008
Some day you might find a peculiar man with long brown hair and uncommonly bushy sideburns studying your face. If you’re lucky, it will be Art Center College of Design instructor and photographic artist Stephen Berkman sizing you up as a possible model for one of his pseudo-historical photographs.
Berkman’s current exhibit, “Chamber Pieces,” is showing at Loyola Marymount’s Laband Art Gallery through Nov. 23. Some of the work has been exhibited before, while some ambrotypes — defined as a positive picture made of a photographic negative on glass backed by a dark surface — were created specifically for this show.
Curator Carolyn Peter first learned about Berkman when he was doing a demonstration and creating the ambrotype that would become “The Exhibition” in which two respectable looking gentlemen who appear to be from the 19th century stand beside a small extraterrestrial. Peter explained, “He doesn’t date his work; he wants to throw us off. Both with his obscura installation pieces as well as these [ambrotypes]. Obviously, [the ambrotypes] feel as if they are from a different time period. You think they are from the 19th century, but there’s always something kind of bizarre about them that either brings you into the 21st century or just throws you off in such a way that you’re not sure when they’re from, and that’s part of the game.”
You don’t have to be a photo history student to know what an ambrotype is. You’ve probably already seen some at antique stores and in the movies. Berkman produced ambrotypes for the movies “Cold Mountain” and “The Fall.” The process uses glass plates coated with a thin layer of collodion that is dipped in silver nitrate, then exposed to light while still wet.
The camera obscura is an optical device that uses a pinhole on one side of a box so that light from the outside scene goes through the hole and projects an upside-down image on the back wall. The installations at Laband required precise measurements and angling of lights and objects.
A filmmaking student at Art Center, Berkman never formally studied photography but says he taught himself because “I was interested in how far you could go back in photography, pre-chemical photography. The camera obscura is an ephemeral experience. Some of the work is about how a camera sees an image and how you see an image”
When one first walks into the gallery, it’s like walking into a curiosity show of yesteryear. You see a clothes dummy dressed in the full black bodice and skirt of antebellum times set against a scenic backdrop like an advertisement for a photographer. On closer examination, the metallic neck of the headless dummy is actually an optical consequence of a camera obscura. The voluminous skirts hide the place where one could view the image the dummy “sees.” Yet the dummy itself is seen as an object in illustrations and is the focus of another optical gadget — a camera lucida, a nearly 200-year-old device that performs an optical superimposition of the subject being viewed upon the surface on which the artist is drawing.
Berkman has many images in his mind and is always looking for set items and sitters to work with his concept. What Peter calls the show’s signature piece, “Conjoined Twins,” required searching for sitters who had just the right look. The joke is they are joined only by a spectacular moustache.
Sharpshooter eyeglasses were the catalyst for his “The Sharpshooter and the Songbird,” and yet weren’t used for that image. The model featured was found locally and, since Berkman doesn’t work with a stylist, required to curl his own hair into ringlets. You’ll see the sharpshooter eyeglasses in another piece: “The Pointilist.”
There’s a mixture of science, art and mysticism, an idea of exploration and discovery in images of the 19th century that appeals to Berkman. While films are many single images together, a single image “has a fragment nature” and you wonder about “what came before and after,” Berkman explained. “There’s an implied narrative, things that this image conjures up. You see information and some of the information has ramifications or implications. For instance, the surgeon with the scenic saw — is the purpose of the saw to soothe the patients with a pastoral scene before he amputates?”
The temporal uncertainty of the works and the mix of authentic antiques and manufactured imposters in Berkman’s pieces leave you guessing and appreciating the wonder of photography before the digital age.
Chamber Pieces” continues until Nov. 23 at Laband Art Gallery, Loyola Marymount University, West Los Angeles. Open from noon to 4 p.m. Wednesdays through Sundays. For more information, call (310) 338-2880 or visit www.lmu.edu/Page27600.aspx.
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