Phil Nesmith is engaged in a rigorous exploration of some of photography’s earliest practices, creating a body of work that reclaims a connection to direct image-making that is now all but forgotten in our post-darkroom age of rapid and digital image reproduction.  Often using handmade equipment, emulsions he brews up himself, and glass plates similar to those used by early photographers in the 19th century, Nesmith produces images and unique photographic objects that possess an almost unfamiliar immediacy to light, space, and time.

Ina recent series entitled Flight Patterns (2009), Nesmith employed one of the earliest photographic processes to create striking images that evoke fragility and transience.  Flight Patterns is a series of dryplate photograms – images that are created directly on photosensitive black glass plates, without a camera or lens.  In the lineage of early 20th century artists like Laszlo Moholy-Nagy and Man Ray, Nesmith’s photograms were created from the shadows cast by objects placed on plates that have been exposed to light.  Although the deliberate process of composing and developing photograms necessitates stillness, the subjects of Nesmith’s Flight Patterns appear anything but.  Birds, bats, and flying insects populate the compositions of Flight Patterns creating the illusion of flight momentarily arrested by a photographer’s shutter.  Although such movement is a fabrication in Flight Patterns, Nesmith skillfully orchestrates these works, engaging us to believe in the fiction of a rarified and fleeting moment.

Nesmith’s exploration of the expressive potential of early photographic techniques continues in Flow (2010), with a dramatic series that confronts the environmental realities of the worst oil spill in U.S. history.  Traveling to the Gulf of Mexico in the summer of 2010, Nesmith brought vintage large-format cameras, wet plate collodion chemicals, black glass plates, and a makeshift darkroom to enable him to create unique glass plate positive images of the aftermath of the effects of the BP Deepwater Horizon spill.  All the images Nesmith created during a three week period were shot and developed right from the vehicle that brought him to the Gulf’s oil-contaminated beaches and marshes and to the harbors where fisherman and clean-up vessels docked.  The vintage look to Nesmith’s images of shrimp boats, barges, deserted beaches, and fishermen creates a powerful tension with the contemporary subjects depicted and urgent work being done in these images.  Creating wet plate collodion images for this series, Nesmith chose a photographic process in use in the 1850′s at the same time that oil was first discovered in the United States when the nation’s lust for oil was still in its infancy.  Although making images through this early technique was demanding and arduous for Nesmith, it was vital to his larger conceptual intent focused on exploring the historic arc of US oil dependence.

The text above, from the Corridor catalog, was written by curator Irene Hofmann.  Two addition pages highlighting my work have not been included in this posting.  Corridor was a group exhibition at the Art Museum of the Americas in Washington D.C. which ended recently.  Flow is currently on view at the Rocky Mountain School of Photography Gallery in Missoula Montana.

Tribute 1 continues to hang at Irvine Contemporary for a few more days, so I hope that if you are in the Washington D.C. area that you will pay the exhibit a visit.  The three new plates (24″) that I prepared for this final exhibition at Irvine’s 14th street location have been shown in detail on this blog under the titles Ultimate Illusion, Harbinger, and Das Narrenschiff, but above you see them as they are installed at the gallery.  It is not common to have installation views of my work mainly because of the problems caused with high gloss of the varnish that I apply to the plate (and mixed light sources).  Even in this image which I have chosen to share with you, artwork from across the gallery is clearly reflected on the surface of the plates at the left and right.  Even so, I wanted to share this image because it shows the very first time I have publicly displayed plates without frames, and I must say that I am pretty excited about the results.

     Over the course of the past three years since My Baghdad was first shown at Irvine Contemporary I have attempted, with the close assistance of master framer and artist Laura Garrett, to develop display solutions that are an integrated part of what the plate is.  This has resulted in a rage of three distinct presentation methods used in each of my solo exhibitions at Irvine.  Each exhibition brought about plate presentations employing a more simplified visual strategy, continually moving away from the heavier elements originally found in the My Baghdad presentation of 2008.  The continual reduction of display elements and the large 24″ plate size for this project  has resulted in what is shown above, the fourth presentation method.  Although the method used for the work shown at Tribute 1 would not be effective for the smaller formats that I commonly work in, such as the 5×7″ plates of Flow (currently on view at the RMSP Gallery in Missoula Montana), it really is nice with the larger glass.

Ultimate Illusion ©2011 Phillip Nesmith

The image above is a 24×20″ black glass dry-plate “ambrotype”, which rounds out the three new plates made for the Tribute 1 exhibition currently on view at Irvine Contemporary in Washington D.C.  The plate is finished with my typical handmade and hand applied sandarac/lavender varnish.  Recently a comment was made that my titles for these recent images are too dark. well if you have not noticed anything “dark” about my Flight Patterns series then maybe you’re not tuned into the same frequency that I am broadcasting on.  There is nothing HD here baby, we are coming to you live on AM.  Even though something is rooted in the darkness of what we are, it does not mean that thing can’t be beautiful visually.  The greatest evils are often camouflaged as the harmless, and sometimes as the beneficial.

The Harbinger and Narrenshiff plates are also included in Tribute 1.

The Harbinger ©2011 Phillip Nesmith

Last night was the opening of the group exhibition Tribute 1 at Irvine Contemporary in Washington D.C.  This show is one of the last two shows (Tribute 2 opens next month) before Irvine leaves it’s 14th street location.  I made three new 24″ (the above image is 24×21″) glass plate images for this event, including The Harbinger show above and Das Narrenshiff which I posted a few days ago.  These works are a continuation of my Flight Patterns series of 2009.  These works contain dark driving forces hidden in the “decorative” compositions, and it is this camouflaging and the simplistic creation method that I enjoy about this work.

The star of this plate is the European Starling, which takes it’s place as the second bird I have used in this cameraless body of work.  The starling in Celtic and Welsh mythology is tied to the idea of communication and/or the messenger, which can be clearly seen in the Welsh story of Branwen who trains a starling to speak, and the bird crosses the Irish Sea to deliver a message to her brother.  The starling is also known by many in birding circles as the harbinger-of-spring as the birds often arrive shortly before robins, and as the harbinger-of-harbingers in some occult circles.  In this work, the bird is used as a symbol of both a messenger as well as a harbinger.

More work of this type can be found in the Flight Patterns gallery of my website.

Das Narrenschiff ©2011 Phillip Nesmith

Das Narrenschiff  (The Ship of Fools) is a 24″ cameraless plate which is part of a three plate collection created specifically for Irvine Contemporary’s Tribute 1 exhibition which opens June 11th.  The hummingbird featured in the image is known to readers familiar with my Flight Patterns body of work, which obviously informed the creation of the image shown above.  Full dimensions of the plate are 19×24″.

The title Das Narrenschiff is borrowed from  Sebastian Brant’s 1494 satire of the same name, and unlike many other ships/boats commonly found in literature of the age such as Symphorien Champier’s Ship of Virtuious Ladies, Ship of Health, and Jacob Van Bade’s Blauwe Schute the Narrenschiff really did exist.  These boats as outlined by Michel Foucault in his book History of Madness drifted from town to town along the rivers of Europe with their cargo of banished madmen.  I do not want to go into too much detail as I plan to write more about the image later, but I thought that it is important to explain where the name came from.

I hope you enjoy the new image, and I ask that you consider visiting  Irvine Contemporary to see it in person.

Catch up with me on my Facebook page.

New 24″ cameraless plates will be on view at Irvine Contemporary’s Tribute 1 exhibit which opens June 11th.   This will be the last time any of my work will be shown at the 14th street location.  For details, click here.  Hope to see you there!

AH64 - ©Phillip Nesmith

I am very proud to inform you that six pieces from the My Baghdad series are being brought out of storage to be part of a very powerful exhibit being put together by the splendid Empty Quarter  Gallery in Dubai, UAE.  This work has not been seen since being shown at Washington D.C.’s Irvine Contemporary in 2008.  The Spectacle Of War exhibit will include a plate that has never been publically displayed, AH64 which is shown above. The details have not yet been posted to the gallery site, so I have provided the information that was sent out as part of the galleries latest newsletter for your reading enjoyment.  This is a must see exhibit if you can get to Dubai!

Keep up with the latest news on Facebook.

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The Spectacle of War

March 14 – April 30, 2011
Opening March 14, 6-11 pm (during Art Dubai Gallery night)

‘By this time next week, sit by your TV and get ready to watch the fireworks’

Benjamin Lowy : Iraq Perspectives
Richard Mosse : Breach & The Fall
Spencer Murphy : Architects of War
Phil Nesmith : My Bagdad
Trevor Paglen : Limit-Telephotography & The Other Night Sky
US Department of Defense & the military industry

Concurrent with Art Dubai and as part of Art Week, The Empty Quarter Gallery is proud to announce our highlight show for this spring “The Spectacle of War”, presenting for the first time in the region a number of multi-published artists, whose work has been exhibited in noted international institutions such as the Tate Modern, the Vienna Secession, the SFMOMA and Musée de l’Élysée, Switzerland.

Contemporary war is presented as a post-modern spectacle, with fluid roles and changing seat orders for viewers, actors, directors and back-stage technicians alike. Visualization of the spectacle has become a vital, viral and seminal activity for all parties involved, both off-stage and on-stage. This visualization happens on different scales, uses a range of technologies, is presented from numerous viewpoints, broadcasted through competing channels, and eventually re-enacted in modern video games. One may say that modern man consumes the war as much as he is consumed by it.

In modern warfare, the camera lens has always been the predestined ‘weapon’ of choice for those tasked with the visualization of the different acts as they are played out, including the stages of preparation and the enduring aftermath of the war. This is no coincidence, if we follow Heidegger’s thinking, that ‘the fundamental event of modernity is the conquest of the world as picture’, and its decisive unfolding a battle of perspectives, ‘for the sake of which mankind brings into play the unlimited violence of the calculation, planning, and breeding of everything.’ It is within this constellation that imaging and mapping technologies have seen a viral growth since the onset of the modern age, with a network of satellites, public and secret ones, now spanning the globe.

Photography matters when it comes to war, in all its shapes, roles and technological reincarnations. The Spectacle of War testifies of this at times uncomfortable liaison by presenting several inroads into the spectacle that war has become, combining works of strategically operating artists, experimental film directors and innovative photojournalists with commercial video games based on the Iraq war and material culled from the military and its corporate arms manufacturers itself. Together with visions of near-future deployment of unmanned vehicles, exoskeletons or nanobots, they might be the closest we can come to drawing up a map of the battleground on which our wars are fought.

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To see the exhibit information posting at gallery’s website, including the images for all of the photographers, click HERE.

Of course, there will always be those who look only at technique, who ask “how”, while others of a more curious nature will ask “why”.

- Man Ray

This is my first post in three months, and the first one of 2011.  What better way to stat a new year than with a review of ones work by Art in America.  Please know that the color of the image has been badly butchered somewhere along the line, but having a review in Art in America is very special and I am very happy to have it.  To read the review, please click the image above.

I am also happy to announce that the Washington City Paper included Flow on their 2010 list of top ten photography exhibits in Washington D.C.

2011 is already shaping up to be a very busy year.  On the books are two group shows, three talks, five workshops, as well as judging entries for a photography show.  I will also be teaching black and white photography again at Virginia State University  as well.  So, as you can see there is no time to get lost day dreaming here, yet I do it anyway. Which reminds me, I need to get back to working on the presentation for this!

On Facebook?  Look me up.

The opening of Flow came and went in a whirlwind of activity, which has yet to fully settle down.  My talk went pretty well and a few people laughed which is always a good sign.  It is always scary, yet liberating to set a project free into the world to live the life it will live.  So far, Flow is doing nicely away from home.  I am asked around the time of each opening of an exhibition how I see success.  Not having a commercial mindset, success of an exhibition for me is to have people show up to look.  A secondary objective is to have an interview or review of the work published (hopefully positive of course).  My past exhibits have been able to achieve these simple expectations, and the same is true for Flow.

The image above is by  Rachel Vorsanger of the student newspaper GW Hatchet.  Let me tell you, Rachel very much impressed me with how she conducted her interview and with the thoughtfulness she had applied to the formulation of her questions.  I have been interviewed by the Associated Press, as well as Craig Melvin of NBC New4 on Washington D.C. as well as some lesser known media organizations over the years, and Rachel made a very good impression with me.  Her resulting writeup of our conversation can be seen here. Many thanks to Rachel for being interested in what I do.

“In these pictures, Nesmith acts as if the spill is already his…tory. Like Burtynsky, he’s buffering us from cold realities. But in historicizing the disaster, Nesmith also folds in a sense of humility in the face of tragedy. The long-term ramifications of the disaster? We just don’t know. History is written in every passing moment. The rest, as they say, is present.”   -Jessica Dawson/Washington Post

In addtion to the interview with the GW Hatchet, this past week, Jessica Dawson wrote a very solid review of Flow for the Washington Post.  Jessica had noted in an earlier issue of the Post that she was looking forward to the opening of the show, and I was very happy to see after reading her review that she was not let down by the results of my efforts.  The last time the Washington Post had such an indepth review of my work was during the My Baghdad exhibition a few years back, and although that one was pretty positive as well, Dawson’s words hit very solid.  The review can be seen here.

The image above was made with my cell phone as I unpacked to work the Nord Sea.  The time draws near when the work made in June will be out in the world.  Five days remain until the opening on Flow in Washington D.C.  The work is no longer in my hands, and all that remains to do is to show up and talk with people about the experience on Saturday.  Talking with people about my work is the thing that I love most.  It is a time when I can relay a back story, intention, or struggle that can sometimes remain hidden, yet can provide an additional entrance point to the work.  With the Gulf project, I feel that a main part of the work was the actual experience of the event and working in the environment, becoming part of it.  While working on the coast and in the wetlands of south Louisiana I often thought to myself that what I was doing was mostly a performance piece that was being conducted in isolation, the resulting ambrotypes becoming some form of evidence or artifact.  Because of this I feel that conversation about this work is very important, and as I am not a writer (made evident by this blog) I look forward to talking about this work with anyone who has interest.  I will be giving a gallery talk about an hour or so before the official opening of Flow and will be available during the reception to talk with visitors.  I hope to you see there!

The Gulf Expedition which resulted in the material for Flow was made possible by financial and material support from the following individuals:

Jennifer Foley, Therese Brown, Zoe Shankle Donald, Vivianne Carey, Laura Kicey, Eric Damon Walters, Bob McGowan, Alison Overton, Jim Sincock, Jeanne, Deborah Pierce, Jeffrey Allison, Dana Walters, Frederick Nunley, Alice Pierce, Lynn Murphy, Igor Svibilsky, Jeff Gilles, Wendie Price, Ernie Barreto, Anne Trabue Watson, Jonathan Danforth, Brad Means, Michael Jacobson, Elizabeth, Amy Glengary Yang, Tom Persinger, Carmella Rodriguez-Hardy, Sean D., Erin McCann, Kellie Benn, Ethel Morton, Pat Padua, Holly Werner, Erin Antognoli, Linda Plaisted, Todd Gardner, Lori Means, Micki Multer, Dawn Werner, Charleston Waterkeeper, Amy Hauft, Charles May, Gina Cavallo Collins, Blue Mitchell, Lily Cox-Richard, Chris Keeling, Carrie Williar, Tracy Lee, Jean Schiller, Melisa Loewe, Lisa Taranto, Laura & Richard Garrett, Lucia & Bill Foley, Craig Lammes, Mark Pekar, Anonymous, Martin Irvine, Christopher Chen, Mark Tirona, Shawne Major, Patrick Crowley, Matthew Larkin, Lisa Darter, Marsha Means, Brianna Gribben, Anne Lassere, Ashleigh Ide, Mary Fritz, Tiffany Ferreira, Jen Bandini, Rob Wolf, B.J. Kocen

The following people made Flow possible:

Jennifer Foley, Therese Brown, Zoe Shankle Donald, Vivianne Carey, Laura Kicey, Eric Damon Walters, Bob McGowan, Alison Overton, Jim Sincock, Jeanne, Deborah Pierce, Jeffrey Allison, Dana Walters, Frederick Nunley, Alice Pierce, Lynn Murphy, Igor Svibilsky, Jeff Gilles, Wendie Price, Ernie Barreto, Anne Trabue Watson, Jonathan Danforth, Brad Means, Michael Jacobson, Elizabeth, Amy Glengary Yang, Tom Persinger, Carmella Rodriguez-Hardy, Sean D., Erin McCann, Kellie Benn, Ethel Morton, Pat Padua, Holly Werner, Erin Antognoli, Linda Plaisted, Todd Gardner, Lori Means, Micki Multer, Dawn Werner, Charleston Waterkeeper, Amy Hauft, Charles May, Gina Cavallo Collins, Blue Mitchell, Lily Cox-Richard, Chris Keeling, Carrie Williar, Tracy Lee, Jean Schiller, Melisa Loewe, Lisa Taranto, Laura & Richard Garrett, Lucia & Bill Foley, Craig Lammes, Mark Pekar, Anonymous, Martin Irvine, Christopher Chen, Mark Tirona, Shawne Major, Patrick Crowley, Matthew Larkin, Lisa Darter, Marsha Means, Brianna Gribben, Anne Lassere, Ashleigh Ide, Mary Fritz, Tiffany Ferreira, Jen Bandini, Rob Wolf, B.J. Kocen

On location in a south Louisiana sugarcane field making wet collodion ambortypes. Will I see you at Flow?

My time in Louisiana during the month of June was about routine.  The first few days of work turned out rough because of a few issues, such a chemical, and just as importantly organizational.  Just because items are in the best location or packing for travel does not mean those are the best places for an optimum workflow.  Sure, sounds like common knowledge, and it is something that I thought about while packing, but it was not until I started working that I was able to determine the best “load plan” as we called it in the Army during a previous life.

Initially it took forever to set up once I located a site of interest.  Setting up the darkbox and chemicals, unpacking the camera, etc. just took too long.  Mixing chemicals and processing….well you get the idea. Many things had to be accomplished for each image and location which is difficult enough without having remember where something might be, or having related items located on different sides of the vehicle.  Over time the final system started to create itself as I worked day after day.  Equipment, chemicals, everything started to claim its own location as well as it’s position in the sequence of setting up and taking down.  The system of organization and employment could only be developed while actually working in the environment and with the specific vehicle that I had.  By the time that my last day had arrived, although the inside of the SUV (image before trip) looked like something a “horder” might drive, it was truly a well-functioning system.  It is easy to haul all of your stuff out and setup and make images when you are working on your time, but when you are dealing with subjects that may not be at the location long, like the Nord Sea for example, I found that speed (if you can use that word with wet collodion photography) was very important.

Equally important to the physical location things, and the order in which task were accomplished, was the prep work done at the end and/or beginning of each day.  One of the most important parts of my routine at camp was to make plates ready for the next day.  I had arrived with a good number of 5×7 and whole plate sized plates for the first week, with a resupply of glass in New Orleans strategically stashed at the University of New Orleans.  Upon arrival I discovered that my glass cleaning (very important to wet collodion work) had not been very successful, which with everything else was causing problems. So, all of my precleaned plates were recleaned at the end of each day.  Although, by trying different methods in the field, the cleaning issues would plaque me the entire trip.  One day, while working on a triptych, I discovered while trying to expose the last plate that the glass was just a little too big to fit in the holder.  As fate would have it, it was my last cleaned plate, and by the time I had another one ready to go the subject had moved.  Because of this event, along with recleaning the glass, the sizes were also rechecked when preparing material for the next day.  So you can see how experiences during the work helped to inform and modify the way that I was used to working.

I had planned to make more whole plate images than 5×7, but once I got out into the field and started working I got concerned about running out of ripe collodion to last the full duration of the trip.  Because of this concern, and fact that my darkbox was better suited to the smaller size, the strategic decision was made to work exclusively with the 5×7.  This choice meant that I quickly ran out of 5×7 plates that I had on board during the first week and had to sacrifice whole plates by recutting them.  The image above was made while cutting down whole plates for the next day.  This was done to save time and fuel that would have been burned going back to NOLA to resupply before the planned time.

In the end, I learned so much about working during a long-term event and what is needed.  I had worked with wet collodion in the field before, but not day after day after day after day after day in such a fluid environment.  The experience was almost overwhelming at times, being witness to such a big event, working out technical issues that could have killed the project, creating/adjusting my workflow, surviving the weather, and hoping to make images worth the massive amount of support that was provided, all add up to something that I will not soon forget.