Phil Nesmith, My Baghdad. This Saturday

Okay, so I stole this post directly from Sean Hennessey's blog. But I had to share. I'll be at this opening, and I highly recommend you all see it too!


Phil Nesmith, Soldier, 2007, dryplate ambrotype (sandarac varnished silver emulsion on black glass)

Phil Nesmith, My Baghdad
January 12 to February 16

Opening Reception, Saturday, January 12: 6-8PM
Irvine Contemporary
1412 14th Street NW

Irvine Contemporary is pleased to announce the opening of Phil Nesmith’s first solo exhibition, My Baghdad, a series of photographs shot in Baghdad and produced on glass plates using a dry plate collodion process. A set of editioned C-print enlargements from the glass plates will accompany the unique images in the exhibition. Opening reception with the artist, Saturday, January 12, 6-8PM.

Contemporary photographers have frequently recovered earlier photographic processes to reinterpret image making and familiar genres of photography. Chuck Close’s daguerreotype portraits, Sally Mann’s wet plate collodion images, and Adam Fuss’s combined daguerreotype and photogram images have become part of the visual language of photography today.

The wet plate collodion process in the history of photographic images is inextricably connected to American Civil War photographs and to the look and feel of these images in our cultural memory. Phil Nesmith has recovered this early process for representing and reinterpreting photographs taken in Baghdad during the current war in Iraq. His new series of images are at once haunting, personal, and reflect back on our cultural memory of images in wartime.

See Phil's blog HERE.