Word: collodion
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...mark for its own sake--Corot was a terrific scribbler at his best--and some are boldly experimental. In the 1850s Corot was among the first artists to explore the so-called cliche-verre, a way of printmaking that entailed covering a sheet of glass with opaque collodion, scratching the design through it, then placing it over photosensitized paper and exposing it to light--an early hybrid of etching and photography...
...does it look like? How does it feel to be in the middle of unimaginable carnage? Safire disposes of such questions in two perfunctory sentences. Then he gets to the important part, a detailed exposition of how photographs are made, circa 1862: "He coated a sheet of glass with collodion, the guncotton dissolved in alcohol and sulphuric ether mixed with a little bromide and iodide of potassium they had compounded the night before...
Nineteenth century travel photographers used chemicals and light to catch distant realities upon a collodion wet plate and bear them home in velvet-lined boxes to London or New York. It was a cumbersome wizardry that they practiced, lumbering across Mexico or Africa in darkroom wagons. In desert heat they crawled under layers of blankets, into lightless black bags, to change their photographic plates. When a photographer named Captain Payer was taking pictures in Egypt for the Viceroy in 1863, the fellahin thought that his camera was a Pandora's box, and-that his black bellows contained cholera; they...
...only other thing worth mentioning about Dracula--aside from the terrible Latex, greasepaint and collodion jobs on a few of the vampires, and the turn-of-the century, tradition vs. modernism theme Badham and Richter apparently tried to concoct in the visuals--is the great love scene that stopped the show on Broadway. As Dracula and Lucy begin to embrace, their figures dissolve into multi-colored silhouettes and recede into the distance, whereupon a bunch of shapely limbs wind and unwind to John Williams' less than austere music. The whole thing is modeled on the title sequences in the Bond...
...gave her one of the earliest models, which consisted of two wooden boxes, one sliding inside the other. "It may amuse, Mother, to try to photograph," they wrote her fondly. Little did they guess. At first Mother could hardly tell the difference between treacle and collodion, the sticky fluid used to coat her glass negatives. But she had an eye and the kind of cast-iron ego that always stands a photographer in good stead. "Few could withstand the extreme fury of her affection," Virginia Woolf wrote in the preface to the first edition in 1926 of Victorian Photographs, recalling...