INTERVIEW WITH LUTHER GERLACH PART I
Luther Gerlach
American, b. 1960
Sapling, 2015
Tintype
14 × 17 in
35.6 × 43.2 cm
Luther Gerlach was born in Blayne, Minnesota in 1960. He apprenticed with Brett Weston in the 1980’s, before learning the wet plate process which he still works in today. Selected permanent collections include the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, The J. Paul Getty Museum, and the Michael G. Wilson Centre for Photography, among others.
JLM: Can you tell us about your background and how you got started in photography?
Luther Gerlach
American, b. 1960
Pathway, 2015
Tintype
14 × 17 in
35.6 × 43.2 cm
LG: Oh, certainly. My father is a social and cultural anthropologist, and so I grew up in an academic family with my father, traveling all over the world, OB cameras or still cameras. And I always had a camera around my neck as a little kid. I pretty much wouldn't leave the house without it. It was a plastic Diana camera, which has now become the hipster, "I'm cool," wear it as the piece of costume jewelry, not only as a tool to photograph, but that was me back in the '60s. And so he would photograph all over the world and I was right beside him. I edited movies in my basement as a kid. And did school projects in film or in stills instead of writing a book report. I have horrible dyslexia, so I have problems writing. So it was a way for me to get through school and express myself. I wound up getting two master's degrees in freshwater biology, the University of Minnesota Duluth. I never thought of it as a way to make a living. It was always something like my father adding information to what I was doing. And then fell in love, moved to California, built a studio out there, and decided to go and work with some of the most famous photographers up in the Monterey-Carmel area. Brett Weston and Ansel Adams, and those people, and photographing with big, big, big, big cameras. And I just got bigger, and bigger, and bigger cameras. And I remember Brett Weston telling me that I was kind of ridiculous getting into a 20-by-24-inch camera, being schooled by one of the best and most famous photographers of his time period and any time period. And I lived and worked with them for two years in Carmel, in Kona, Hawaii. And I reel developed my black and white . I decided I am going to be doing forever at that point. Never got back into biology.
LG: So, what year was this with Brett Weston? Three years before he passed away.
JLM: Did he give insight into Edward Weston?
LG: Oh, well, as a child, I talk about my stories. He'd tell about his stories, going to Mexico and what have you. Somehow Brett was always considered to be one of these people that was very hard to talk to, didn't want to socialize with people, and sort of pushed people away. We both loved photography without having the ego and attitude attached to it, I guess, and just doing it sort of for the more in-depth love of it and the history of photography, instead of trying to be the new, trendy guy. And somehow we hit it off very well because of that. But yeah, I have dozens of stories of Brett. And of course, Edward. He had passed away by that point, but we would print in Ed's darkroom by moonlighti n that darkroom. And as a young 20-year-old artist want-to-be... I'm still a want-to-be. And it was beyond belief that I was in that presence of those people. The ghosts all around me, I still can't believe it. It's still hard for me to even tell the stories because it doesn't seem real.
JLM:. So when did you get into wet plate and all that? Can you comment?
LG: Yes, absolutely. When did I get involved with wet plate collodion? In 1998, I did. At that point, digital was just coming in and digital printing. And I had been spending the last 10 years before that selling my photography, one on one, in a big white tent on the street. And I loved talking about the photography work that I was doing. I was doing alternative processes, calotypes, platinum prints, carbon prints, and what have you at the time. 16-by-20 or 20-by-24-inch prints and it did very, very well with them, and had sort of a brushed quality with the water. People loved... That was at the time when shabby-chic was really in. So the hand-made quality of photographic prints worked really well and people were not doing this at that time period. And so I did well. People started copying what I did digitally, in regards to making the edges of their prints kind of painterly looking. That kind of stuff. And I had enough of it, digital turning more and more phony and less real. And I just had to find something different. At that point, wet plate collodion, ambrotypes, and tintypes really weren't on most people's radar. Being always a historian, liking working with these alternative processes, historical processes, I said, "Why not try to figure that out again?" People were not doing it. Tintypes and ambrotypes as portraits with poorly lit, almost mugshot quality lighting. But back then, there were only five people working in it in the world. And in 2000, I found out that there was a workshop [by two people, France Osterman, well, Scully & Osterman from the Eastman House. And this was up in Missoula, Montana. It just happened to be on a weekend that I was traveling through there. My brother lives up there. And I said, "Well, why don't I just go do this workshop?" Well, what it did was, it filled in the gaps that historical books weren't able to. When you read books from the 1860s about wet plate collodion, it said, "Pour the plate in a normal manner." They had diagrams and etchings, but it was very hard to follow that. Also, it had a style of writing that was very hard to follow in modern-day English. So I was very lucky to have that workshop and it filled in all the gaps. And then I knew exactly what I was going to be doing after that. I put away all my film cameras. I put away all my stuff. I transferred the plate holders from film plate holders over to wet plate collodion holders and changed my studio. Well, changed everything to what I needed to work exclusively on wet plate collodion. And I was one of the first to work only in wet plate collodion with big cameras. And when I started, there was a website. Well, not a website, a forum. And when I started 20-by-24 and larger images, they questioned why I had such an ego to be able to make such big work. Well, I said, "It presented itself really well on a wall that way as artwork." But they were doing civil war reenactments, so why make a really big image? Nobody was going to carry that around a battlefield, so to speak. All the original ambrotypes and tintypes were very small, but I saw it really presented as artwork. And that's when I got started, and I was very fortunate. I already had big cameras and big lenses and had hundred-some lenses in my collection at the time. And a lot of pictorial lenses, a lot of soft-focus lenses, a lot of different lenses that created different looks. So I immediately adopted the old lenses for wet plate. The piece of glass or the metal plate that was actually in the field with me at the time I photographed with it was (a unique work) versus a limited edition, which I was making in all these other processes. So I really enjoyed that.
JLM: So can you talk about your association with the Getty, and how you work with them, and what you've done? Is it teaching or can you explain a bit of it?
LG: Oh, sure. I started at the Getty, gosh, right around the time I got involved with the wet plate collodion. There happened to be the Old Getty, which down in Malibu was just opening. The Getty primarily worked with ancient, ancient artwork. And they had an exhibit on photography showing that ancient artwork from the 1860s, '50s, '60s, '70s, '80s. Most of the work was shot with wet plate collodion negatives. And so they asked me to do a demonstration on it. Well, I jumped at the opportunity to build a monster camera and a darkroom, the same way these photographers would've used in the famous photographs. . And I dragged this big monstrous thing into the Getty, into their pristine floors and what have you, in this Roman or Italian villa that they've recreated up on the mountain. And it was huge. I found this gorgeous little place to set this big monster in, and put tarps for the wet plate collodion. It's notoriously dirty. It drips silver on terracotta tiles. And that's when I got started and I started doing a series of demonstrations and workshops on historical processes, always in conjunction with whatever photographer was being shown. So if it was Carleton Watkins, I would talk about the work that he did in Yosemite with 18-by-22-inch mammoth plate camera. And because I walked in his footsteps, used the same technologies that he used and the same lenses that he used, and all of what he photographed and what he didn't photograph and explained how the printing processes were done, how the negatives were made, how he worked. And I would have tables full of all of my collections of historical cameras, lenses, and all the other stuff that would go along with it, how to clean a glass plate, the racks, and the things to draw plates. And so it was up to me, because at the Getty, you did not go into their vaults and pick out their stuff. That was a big no-no. You couldn't do that. So I brought all of this to magnify what was being shown at the Getty, I would do that with Oh, yes. All my collections, plates, and my own images done with the same processes. If it was a pictorialist photographer that had soft focus images, I would find out what lenses the particular photographer would own. I would get on eBay, I would call up friends, and what have you. And I would go out in the field and graph with the same lenses, understanding what that brought to those photographs and how a person has to see in the field and pre-visualize an image through the technologies, whatever they were using. And because I used it, versus other photographers who did not use it... They just read books on it. And well, if you do something, you know how that photographer thought about, why he stepped into the field and worked, and how they did that.
JLM: Okay, so we have Enchanted Forest on Artsy right now, on exhibition.
With Enchanted Forest, did you do a lot of preliminary sketches, or write down ideas notebooks on that before you put it together?
LG: Well, I first went to Holland. I was invited to be giving a master class and a lecture at the very first Wet Plate Collodion Weekend, they call it. And it was a weekend designated for people who were interested in wet plate collodion from all over Europe to come together. And so, the very first time I went to Holland, I had no idea what I was going to be photographing. I honestly thought the dikes, and the interesting cities, and that kind of stuff, and old churches. More architectural kind of stuff, I thought I would probably be interested in. But driving back from the airport, my friend picked me up. I couldn't believe how beautiful the beach forests were. And seeing a lot of BBC, British Broadcasting System kind of movies and that kind of imagery growing up, with all the British visuals I instantaneously recognized those beach forests, and the fairy tales, and all of this that went with it. And I knew that was something I wanted to go and photograph. And in the process that I work with, I could bring something magic out of the pure visualization of it. Brett Weston also went to Holland and photographed images of Holland, but his images of the beach trees and the forests are exactly as you expect. They're just very good photographs of beach trees, with nothing more really added to it.
Luther Gerlach
American, b. 1960
Petsval's Valley of the Fairy, 2015
Tintype
14 × 17 in
35.6 × 43.2 cm
JLM: Right, okay. So Hannah has some questions for you I'm going to incorporate into this. She says, "Can you tell the story behind Storyteller #3?
LG: Yes. Actually, the gentleman... He was a once-upon-a-time truck driver, believe it or not, who was tired of sitting in a truck and started reading books to children in parks. And this wasn't such of a novel idea. A lot of people did this, but he started making little birdhouses and selling birdhouses to the parents. It's a full costume, whatever costume that was. It was also a made-up costume, and he fit straight into the fairytale kind of concept that I was photographing. So I asked him if I could photograph him and he loved the idea. Sherpa, that's his name. Yeah, it was just one more of these interesting characters that you just sort of meet sometimes. I photographed most of those images with one of two lenses. The image that she had mentioned was photographed with an 1860 Petzval lens, a big, monster, monster lens that creates a lot of swirl in the focus area. So there was a very dreamy quality. It was designed by Joseph Petzval, an Austrian mathematician. The Joseph Petzval lenses, were the fastest lenses of the early time period, 1850s. It was the very first lens made for daguerreotypes that were fast with a __field of focus. So if you photograph a building unlike with a modern lens, and you have a doorway in the middle of that building and you have two windows to either side of that door, the building will be in focus, and the other two windows will be out of focus. Or you could have the two windows on either side of the door in focus and the door will be out of focus. It creates a curved field of focus, which in photography, was inherently a problem. But it was a fast lens, which means it produces an image faster on the plate. Photography is nothing but compromises, and you have to disseminate the compromises to your best ability to create something unique and special. But everything's a compromise in photography. We don't think of that when we pick up our iPhones and photograph anymore. We don't think of that with digital for the most part anymore. But photography through most of its time period was a compromise. Everything's a compromise. And you just have to figure out what is the best compromise out of all of the situations that that technology gives you to make an image with. And I immediately saw him within the swirl of the view from that lens even before I put the lens on the camera. There are other images photographed with him, made with a super, super wide-angle lens and you'll see the entire oak tree and him walking away off on a path. And everything seems huge, and you feel like a little mouse almost in the photograph looking up at this monstrous tree in this monstrous world. But that's an incredibly sharp lens, very different than the other lens.
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JLM: Right, great. This is a totally different effect. And you had the one of the tree, the swirling with just the tree.
LG: Oh, the tree branches. Yes, that was photographed with that same Petzval.
JLM:How does sunlight work in your photography? How do you know when the light is right to capture a photo?
LG: Well, for me and wet plate collodion, I'm only photographing with invisible light for the most part. 90% of the sensitivity of a wet plate collodion image is invisible ultra-violet. It is invisible to your eye. So it's sensitive to blue and ultraviolet. So in historical photographs, for the most part, you do not see clouds within skies because blue is white, and white is white, and it overexposes is the sky. So it's very, very different. Blue eyes turn white. Brown eyes will turn black. You have to understand when you're photographing what exactly the plate is going to see.
