The Pre-Digital Photographic Image, ‘Lost and Found’

At USC’s Fisher Gallery, “Lost and Found: Rediscovering Early Photographic Processes” is a lovely, low-budget funeral for lens-based imagery, which, since the introduction of digital pictures, has started to fade into the past.

Organized by the USC museum studies class, the oddly haunting exhibition includes early and recent photographs made the old-fashioned way, by exposing specially treated surfaces to the light of the world. Guided by Robert Sobieszek, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s curator of photography, and program and gallery director Selma Holo, Suhjung Hur, Elizabeth Ann Neal, Frances M. Ozur and Tami Rene Philion have laid out an exhibition that invites us to pay our respects to a medium that changed the world by changing the way we see ourselves.

The exhibition’s heart and soul resides in a fine selection of daguerreotypes, ambrotypes and tintypes, which date from 1841 to the 1920s. None of these once-cherished portraits was intended to be seen as a work of art. All were made by anonymous, commercial craftsmen, and most of the pictures portray equally anonymous individuals who hold their poses with a seriousness of purpose rarely seen in contemporary portraits.

The daguerreotypes are the most ghostly and mysterious. Each palm-size, silver-plated sheet of copper has the elusive presence of a hologram yet the clarity and detail of a silver print. From some angles all you see is a luminous mist hovering above a mirror-like surface. Tilting your head causes the image to pop into focus like a spirit conjured from the beyond.

Named after its French inventor, Louis-Jacques-Mande Daguerre, and introduced in 1839, daguerreotypes required exposures of between 15 and 20 minutes. The 21 here were made from 1841 to 1862.

In another display case, 21 ambrotypes are less atmospheric and sharper in detail. Advertised as “daguerreotypes without the reflections,” these exquisite pictures on glass required exposures of five to 50 seconds and became available in 1851. Although a few look as if they have been hand-painted or colorized, most consist of rich ranges of crystalline grays.

A third vitrine holds 25 tintypes, which possess the classic American values of being faster, cheaper and easier. Made available in 1856, this process required exposures of 20 seconds or less. Cameras with multiple lenses produced several images simultaneously. Photographers used tin snips to cut apart the enameled iron sheets on which they appeared, giving these works their name. Their surfaces aren’t as beautiful, but the convenience and affordability yield a wider range of poses, many of which anticipate the snapshots.

Another gallery presents 16 daguerreotypes, ambrotypes and tintypes made over the last three years by contemporary artists Chuck Close, Luis Gonzalez Palma, Jayne Hinds Bidaut and Stephen Berkman. The best of these works echoing the achievements of the early photographs, the worst add very little.

The small, straightforward portraits by Gonzalez Palma and Close (who collaborated with Jerry Spagnoli) are the most powerful. These entrancing images of Mayan women from Guatemala and artists from New York possess a fullness and dignity so stunning it’s easy to imagine that they were made with some futuristic technology, rather than techniques as old as photography itself.

In contrast, Bidaut’s life-size photograms of skeletons have the presence of rudimentary lab experiments from the 18th century. Berkman’s series of repeated and superimposed images are even more theatrically overblown.

Instant signifiers of death, both these bodies of work lack the resonance of the unadorned portraits, which, alongside the early photographs memorialize an era that existed before digitally generated imagery came between the world and its photographic representation.

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“Lost and Found: Rediscovering Early Photographic Processes,” USC Fisher Gallery, 823 Exposition Blvd., (213) 740-4561, through April 21. Closed Sundays and Mondays. Free.