From the River to Paris

by Deb Dawson

The Maine Museum of Photographic Arts is delighted to announce a recent gift from collectors, Richard and Jeanne Press of several prints and ambrotypes by photographer, Michael Kolster. During our Zoom interview, we discussed in depth the evolution of Michael’s ambrotype process starting with the series, The Take Me to the River: Four Atlantic Rivers. This series and resulting book represents a confluence of idea and process that came together to address the current state of four rivers along the Atlantic coast that have been transformed by local industrial activities to the point of being “biologically dead” as in the case of Maine’s Androscoggin River. Forty years after passage of the Clean Water Act of 1972, many industrialized rivers such as the Androscoggin are returning from the dead. They are in a continuous state of transformation into a fascinating dichotomy of natural ecology and man-made structure. Michael’s studio resides in the restored Brunswick textile mill that once relied on the energy created from the adjacent dammed Androscoggin River. After years of looking out over the river and fishing along its shores, Michael became interested in the lives these rivers have lived through our industrial abuses and their transformation as they now recover and thrive while being appreciated as recreational resources. Around the same time, Michael was exploring wet-plate photographic processes partly as a way to become more independent of film manufacturers’ dwindling stocks and rising prices. He became thoroughly captivated by the process that felt much more physical and immersive than digital capture. The very nature of working with a fragile wet plate, with its own idiosyncrasies and sensitivities has a life of its own. Through serendipity, Michael’s research of the ambrotype process, which was originally developed during the later part of the industrial revolution in the 1850’s, collided with his fascination with the very rivers damaged by industrial pollution. There was a certain kind of alchemy between the process of pouring collodion onto a glass plate and adding silver salts to make a transformative, fragile light sensitive surface in order to record the flow of these industrialized rivers in their own ever-changing state of existence through shifting sediment and ecology.

Starting with the Androscoggin River from source to sea, Michael continued down the east coast photographing other urban industrialized rivers such as the Schuylkill, James and Savannah rivers. These rivers will forever be compromised in some form, never to return to the state of purity before our reckless industrial endeavors. It is this dichotomy of natural and man-made worlds that Michael explores as he photographs them in their current state of beauty or decay to find a new quality of existence in relation to the urban landscape. Working in collaboration with the ambrotype process, the very experience of making the photographs — setting up a camera and portable darkroom on-site, sensitizing the plate, rushing back to the camera to make the exposure (timing by gut feeling), then back to the portable darkroom to develop the image by also intuitively judging the timing, then seeing the faintest hint of an image begin to appear and evolve is a transformative experience in itself. With Michael’s perspective and sensitive vision in representing these riverine places, the resulting ambrotype images coalesce into ethereally beautiful glass negatives that are also positive when viewed in front of a black background – another fascinating dichotomy of existence all in one frame.

Michael photographed each of these rivers intently from 2011 to about 2014 culminating in the masterfully rendered book, Take Me to the River: Four Atlantic Rivers. We can only highlight a few of Michael’s ethereal ambrotype images here on MMPA’s site which barely touches the surface to convey the depth of the work. I ordered Take Me to the River in order to gain a better understanding of the project, and was greeted with a massive hard cover, 240 page volume produced with the same intense attention to detail that Michael gives to each of his labor-intensive ambrotypes. Each river series is presented in a dedicated section introduced by geographic and historic details, then flows from source to outlet via Michael’s beautifully composed images of the river and surrounding environs. The reader gets the sense of traveling alongside Michael and the river as the landscape evolves from rural communities at the source to urban centers of commerce where ports meet the sea. The photographic series is wonderfully framed with essays that provide historical context by Alison Nordstrom and Matthew Klingle. Alison focuses on literary and artistic movements as well as the ascendence and decline of analog photography from the industrial age to present. While Matthew’s essay concludes the series with the societal history of human development that is so dependent on the flow of rivers for transportation, energy, industry and commerce. Having grown up near the Schuylkill River and living near the Androscoggin River, I now view each in a new light of interconnected history and transformation. Learn more about these remarkable rivers through Michael’s work and collaborations at https://www.michaelkolster.com/rivers

– Deb Dawson

L.A. River

Michael continued his deep photographic exploration of the reemergence of America’s industrial rivers with a second series and book entitled L.A. River with essays by Frank Gohlke and D.J. Waldie published in 2019. When the Los Angeles River flowed freely through forests and marshes it supported indigenous peoples and lead to the birth of the city itself. Today, the Los Angeles River is barely a skinny ribbon of water trickling through massive concrete flood control basins. The stark landscape of sun-baked concrete seems to be the most inhospitable place to support any river life. Through the variabilities of the nineteenth century ambrotype process, Michael again shows us an intimate portrait and complexities of a river in transition as local environmental groups try to peel back the layers of concrete to reveal a glimpse of the river as it once was.

Learn more about the L.A. River project here.

Hawaii’s Plastiglomerates

Michael’s curious mind seems to be a constant state of flow as he next turned his eye to the concept of plastic waste and how it will become a future indicator of human existence in the Anthropocene. Upon reading a New York Times report about a Geological Society of America paper describing how this may happen on the Big Island of Hawaii, where plastic debris washed up on Kamilo Beach is melted into the constantly forming volcanic rock, Michael set out in search of these plastiglomerates. Again, the dichotomy of a dynamic natural environment interacting with the man-made world courses through the resulting photographs. Though for this series, Michael turned to a technique of stereography to render these plastiglomerates with a three dimensional effect as is sometimes used in scientific research. Michael best summarizes the irony of the path that plastic takes from fossil extraction to industrial manufacture, then back to the earth as hybrid molten rock in his statement:

“The juxtaposition of the newest form of earth, volcanic rock, with the newest, most prevalent and durable human-made material, plastic, deserves attention. Plastic comes from petroleum, extracted from deep inside the earth, itself the result of fossilized life forms. Lava flows are the innards of the earth expelled and exposed as tectonic plates shift and move across the earth's surface. Plastic is commonly heated and extruded into forms to then solidify as it cools, mimicking molten rock as it emerges from a volcano to eventually cool and become terra firma. Now, as conjoined "stones" the plastiglomerates are poised to return to the earth from which they came. In a million years from now, their immutable nature will indicate to future beings our current moment at the edge of the next geological era.”

Learn more about this fascinating series from Hawaii here.

Paris Park

Finally, we at MMPA are very much looking forward to Michael’s third book to be published with George T. Thompson Publishing, L.L.C., Paris Park Photographs. Inspired by French photographer, Eugéne Atget, Michael visited many of the same parks of Paris, France working with rolls of 120 film and a strobe, themselves a bit outmoded today in much the same way Atget’s use of glass plates were out of fashion as he explored these parks 100 years ago. Here, Michael explored the formally designed parks out to their fringes where time, inattention and entropy allowed nature to take over where man left off. The carefully sequenced photographs of each park reveal moments along the well-worn paths through the quiet adaptations of nature among the formal designs of man. It is a documentation of revelation presented in a book inspired by Walker Evan’s, American Photographs, published by MOMA in 1938. Paris Park Photographs also includes an afterward by Michelle Kuo who is a writer, attorney and an associate professor in the History, Law and Society program at the American University of Paris. Her historical perspective and time spent in Paris’ parks will illuminate the historical significance of Michael’s photographic interpretation of these familiar places. Due to be released in the spring of 2022, keep an eye on Michael Kolster’s web site for updates. A preview of the photographs and narrative can also be found on Michael’s site, at https://www.michaelkolster.com/paris-park-photographs

Biography

Michael Kolster is a photographer, Professor of Art at Bowdoin College, and a 2013 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellow in Photography. His photographs are in numerous collections, including the American University of Paris, Princeton University, Brown University, Center for Creative Photography, George Eastman Museum, High Museum of Art, Museum of Contemporary Photography, Smith College Museum of Art, and Williams College Museum of Art.

He has exhibited nationally and internationally, including solo exhibitions at the American University of Paris, Schroeder Romero and Shredder in New York City, SRO Gallery at Texas Tech University, Page Bond Gallery in Richmond, Virginia, and the Telfair Museums in Savannah, Georgia, among others.

Kolster holds a BA in American studies at Williams College, an MFA at the Massachusetts College of Art, and a certificate from the full-time Documentary Photography program at the International Center of Photography in New York City.

His book Take Me To The River (George F. Thompson Publishing, 2016) was nominated for the Aperture First Book Award. His second book, L.A. River (GFT Publishing, 2019) explores the ongoing channelization of the river running through America’s second-largest city.

Kolster lives in Brunswick, Maine, with his wife, Christy Shake, son, Calvin, and Nellie, their goldendoodle.

Down by the River:

Exploring American Waterways 40 Years After the Clean Water Act

by Michael Kolster

These photographs describe transitional American Rivers on the occasion of the 40th anniversary of the 1972 Clean Water Act. They also attempt to explore the paradoxical nature of rivers as particular places constantly formed by time and ever changing. My interest in rivers comes from how they embody the ever-shifting nature of our own attachments to place and to one another, giving shape to the flow of time that washes our days away.

Beyond creating conventional black-and-white and color film and digital photographs and video clips, I have experimented: by layering multiple digital exposures into one image; scanning large-format black-and-white film negatives of structures along the river’s banks, then digitally hand-coloring these images; making multiple images of a scene and arranging them in a grid to provide a larger, slightly overlapping view; and, most recently, using a wet-plate photographic process from the nineteenth-century to make ambrotypes—unique positive images formed on glass plates.

To paraphrase the pre-Socratic Greek philosopher Heraclitus, “One can never step into the same river twice.” Despite the many gains made since the Clean Water Act, America’s urban, industrial rivers will most likely always remain compromised ever-shifting affairs reflecting the dynamic nature of human and natural demands. But this doesn’t mean that they don’t matter or that they cannot recover differently. For Heraclitus, the river became a powerful metaphor shaping his larger philosophy of panta rhei, or “everything flows,” yet he didn’t deny permanence, either. Just as much as the waters flowing over your feet are ever changing, something of the river remains. Flux and persistence can and do coexist. For me, photography is the vehicle to explore, embrace, and ultimately share with others the paradox that Heraclitus outlined two and half millennia ago: that flux, or change, as a central component of our daily lives, coexists with our ability to discern patterns in all that is swirling around us; that to see and remember what persists in the current of time enables us to form attachments with other people, places and things surrounding us in this life. Embracing this paradox, allowing for uncertainty to lap at the toeholds of our attachments in order to test their strength and adjust them as required, defines a part of the challenge of what it means to be human.

The invention of the wet-plate photographic process in 1850 marks an era when the industrialization and degradation of the river was kicking into high gear. And, of course, the invention of photography itself just 11 years earlier was a result of the period’s industrialization and technological advances. By using a nineteenth-century process to make photographs today, I attempt to engage the viewer in a consideration of the photograph’s slippery status as record of fact and stimulant of the imagined. The photographs’ tonalities and inherent flaws, along with the strange effect of viewing the photograph, called an ambrotype, on a plate of glass, suggest an experience of seeing that hearkens back to the 1850s, before cell phones, automobiles, and the Internet, when the places we occupied looked very different than they do today.

The process of making an ambrotype begins by pouring the collodion solution, whose consistency and color resembles maple syrup, onto a plate of 8” x 10” glass. I then dip this wet, thinly coated plate into a silver bath to sensitize it to light, run to expose the plate in the camera and quickly return to my dark box to pour developer over the still-wet plate before I fix its image permanently onto the glass in another chemical bath. All of this occurs on site at the river’s edge. Each step must be performed immediately in sequence without fail, giving me a finished photograph within 15 minutes. The results are handmade photographs, which for us these days is a bit of an oxymoron. The conventional photograph of today and for much of photography’s history is largely a product of standardized industrial and mechanical processes playing unseen in the background. As Kodak proclaimed back in its heyday, “You push the button and we do the rest.”

Running counter to George Eastman’s desire to minimize the handmade qualities of the photograph and thereby remove the messy inconsistencies of life from the production of the image for the consumer, the wet-plate process attracted me despite or perhaps due to how cumbersome, laborious, and particular it is. Initially I justified its use by how distinctive and seemingly magical the results can be. What really excited me was discovering how the process complemented my choice of subject both literally and conceptually. The physical correspondence is direct: water and “wetness” are the key elements to both. And the historic arcs of chemical photographic processes and our rivers’ industrial alteration seem to mirror one another, suggesting the two are sides of the same coin. In similar ways the photographic plate and the river convey flow and instability, while simultaneously they reference a longstanding relationship between the irrevocably altered nature of the places we live in and our ability to make photographs of them.

These resulting ambrotypes, with all their flaws, also intrigue me for how they present a contradictory vision of the world, simultaneously contemporary but seemingly from some other time and place. They describe the river as it looks and acts today in shockingly rich detail yet, because the plates are only sensitive to very limited wavelengths of visible light, most colors in the world are rendered in the images with a narrow range of tones. To me they cut between a rich, yet limited, range of information, much like a memory or a dream. I love how they suggest simultaneously the immediacy of flowing perceptual experience, of the here and now, while also conjuring up a period of time and a place we can only imagine. – MK