With Mark Osterman

Afterimage, March-April, 2004 by Joanna Heatwole

"No one thinks long of the age of a Stradivarius once it begins to be
played by a vituoso. So it should be with the ambrotype in Ostermans'
hands."
--Grant Romer, George Eastman House

Mark Osterman's new show, Confidence, is open at the Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York City through March 13, 2004. The ambrotype images in his latest work are an homage to an outdoor theatrical medicine show which Osterman performed for over twenty years. Osterman and his wife, France Scully Osterman, are credited internationally with the revival of the collodion process in contemporary photography through their commitment to historical research, application and teaching. He is currently Photographic Process Historian for the Advanced Residency Conservation Program in Photograph Conservation at George Eastman House in Rochester, New York. Bruno Chalifour met with Mark Osterman on February 4, 2004.

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How did you get started in photography?

I grew up in a very historic part of Pennsylvania. Bucks County, is a haven for painters and writers and poets. My father is a writer and my mother's a painter. Although she was academy trained, her work eventually became more abstract. She's still very active, in fact, she's showing right now.

Living in an area with a lot of antiques, I saw lots of vintage photography and was very familiar with it. When I was growing up I did a lot of painting. I was groomed to be a painter and went to art school to be a painter. Something snapped in art school where I got less interested in painting, and actually got interested in musical instrument making instead. It was By the time I got in college, I was already playing music and performing.

What type of instrument?

The Banjo. I was playing on tourist attractions, like the steam train in New Hope. So when I was in art school, I was making string instruments. At the same time I was taking pictures of antique instruments and learning how to use a 4"X5" camera for documentation. At the time, photography, for me, was only used for documenting the instrument making, not for art's sake, but I was getting interested in large format. And at one point I was hired to make a banjo that was to be inlayed with silver. Before I cut this sheet of silver, I decided it would be fun to make a daguerreotype. I polished the silver and put it over iodine fumes and put it in my 4X5 camera. After the exposure, I held it over a container of mercury with a lamp under it and got an image. I did it three or four times to satisfy my curiosity and then cut it up into inlays and put it into the banjo and sold the banjo. So that was my first experience with making something with an historic process. I'd seen daguerreotypes and ambrotypes at the flea markets and the antique shops back in Pennsylvania.

By the time I got out of college my main interest was in musical instrument making. I opened a shop to make string instruments and did that for a couple of years until I saw an opening in a private school. The private school was a Quaker boarding school called the George School in Newton, Pennsylvania. I was there for 20 years teaching fine art photography. So my interest in photography really leaned more toward fine art photography not just documentation at that time.

So, regarding fine art photography, did you have any training in it?

I had no formal training in photography. You have to understand that in the 70s, when the first wave of interest in historic processes came--which back then they called "alternative processes," which is a term I never use because I never know what it is alternative to--in those days, what you found were platinum, palladium, cyanotype, gum. Everything that is the second-generation [prints and not the negative NFTE]. No one made the actual negatives with the "alternative" or historic processes. The collodion negative was the matrix from which every single historic printing process originates, with the exception of salt printing which came with the calotype. People are still trying to figure out a modern way of making a negative that will print well with those processes. Up until computers people were using graphic arts film to get the proper density. I saw that people were using ortho film, and I said: "They didn't use ortho film back then, what did they use?" So I started to investigate the collodion processes and luckily the school had this two-gallon container of collodion from 1948. I used this collodion from to do my first experiments and started to get images. That was about 1987. By the time I met France, my wife, it was 1990. I was already getting repeatable results making ambrotypes, and collodion negatives. Of course when we met we established "Scully and Osterman," and then she started her own work. France had some experience with black and white photography, but not large format or collodion.

What was the key step that led you to make repeatable negatives?

It's like riding a bicycle: one day you can't and the next day you can. To get to the point where you have repeatable results is a very difficult thing with a process like this where you're making your own film.