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As the subtitle suggests, the exhibit displays a profound consciousness of our historical moment. Indeed, the curator of the show, Linda Briscoe Myers, clearly sees it as a rejoinder to the “bloodless” quality of much digital photography. “It is vital to realize the aesthetic advantages of preserving the past,” she states in a press release. “The exhibition demonstrates that there is an inherent beauty to these handcrafted images that differ from those produced through digital technology.”

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Of course, this demonstration might have been made in the form of a straightforward historical exhibit since nearly half the show consists of nineteenth-century photographs. There are, for instance, early daguerreotypes from the Gernsheim collection, cyanotypes by Anna Atkins, and calotypes by Robert Adamson, David Octavius Hill, and William Henry Fox Talbot. There are photogenic drawings, albumen silver prints, ambrotypes, carbon prints, tintypes, platinum prints, gum bichromate prints, bromoil prints, and stereographs. There are photos on ceramic and on cloth. There are hand-colored prints and photocollages. There are even, possibly for the first time under the rubric of historical processes, gelatin silver prints. The array is dazzling and captivating and gives concrete evidence for the significance, aesthetic and otherwise, of past photographic processes. Despite the real interest of the historical collection–and the Ransom Center has unique holdings that make such an overview particularly strong–the contemporary photographs are, in the end, the most compelling part of the show. That is, their relation to historical precedent is what makes the exhibition such a welcome provocation.

The current interest in historical photographic processes–which includes the work of well-established artists like Chuck Close and Sally Mann–has its own history. Emerging out of the counterculture of the late 1960s, alternative process photography, as it came to be known, appealed to photographers seeking a simpler, more intensely handcrafted aesthetic. For John Coffer, who traveled across the United States in the 1970s and early 1980s making and selling tintypes, alternative process photography was part of a wider critique of modernity. In his introduction to alternative process photography in Photography’s Antiquarian Avant-Garde: The New Wave in Old Processes (2002), Lyle Rexer claims that “Coffer’s choice is political, a conscious rejection of a society based on consumption and dependent on technology.” (3) More recently, Mark and France Scully Osterman have revived wet collodion techniques, and Mike Ware has virtually reinvented several of John Herschel’s processes. Initially, such processes were seen as alternatives to the dominant use of film and gelatin silver paper, hence the term alternative process. In recent years, however, some photographers have turned to these processes as a direct reaction to digital photography. Mark Kessell, who was forced to learn digital photography in graduate school, is one example. In the wall text next to his 1999 daguerreotype, ironically titled Digitalis I, he explains the genesis of his project: “In protest I turned to the ‘opposite’ of digital photography, seeking out the earliest and most irreproducible of all photographic techniques.”