C h a r l i e   S c h r e i n e r

Daguerreotype Photos

 

 

Charlie Schreiner received a Master of Fine Arts Degree from the Rhode Island School of Design. He is a freelance industrial designer and lives and works along the shores of Lake Michigan.

Photography has always been an important tool in his business and he also uses photography as an expressive medium. The daguerreotype is his passion and his daguerreotypes have been exhibited at the George Eastman House in Rochester, NY; Ohio State University; Tri-Cities Museum in Grand Haven, MI; New England School of Photography in Boston; Oakland Museum in California; the North Light Gallery, AZ U.; A Photographers Place, NYC; The Atlanta History Center; The Henry Ford Museum; and the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City; Center for Photographic Art, Carmel, CA. ...

My interest in daguerreotypes came from collecting vintage images and the periodic wistful thought of making them. I had collected copies of the old journals and several reprints of books on the subject and on paper, at least, understood how it was done. Uncertainties abounded, such as where to find plumbago or whether or not to mess with cyanide of potassium and a long list of others. In time I heard about and then spent time with a person who made daguerreotypes and since have been making them for over ten years.

The initial hurdles in the daguerreotype are technical. The chemicals are corrosive, toxic, and lethal. The necessary containers and techniques for handling the chemicals must be made and established and be fail safe. Plates must be procured--find polished copper and have it plated with pure silver. Once these pieces are in place the hard part starts--making an image. I have likened the process to making bread. It is simple: mix water, flour, salt, yeast and then bake in the oven. But what if you didn't know how much of each or how hot the oven should be? So it is with the daguerreotype--it all has to be discovered.

Since I am a product designer, many of my images are object oriented, recorded or catalogued in a sense like a museum might do before putting the thing into storage. Today's common item becomes the next century's strange curiosity and on one level I am playing a game with whoever might look at these 150 years from now. But also, the daguerreotype records an object with the most extreme detail and a marvelous transformation on the surface of the plate takes place that makes the object look "more real" than the object itself. Holographic is a common description and the detail seen in glass or chrome or surface imperfections pop out and float above the surface quite unlike the same image on a paper print. Plus, color--you will see a lot of it in daguerreotypes--some controlled, some of it unpredictable, and some real color.

My recent work has involved studio nudes. Capturing the human form presents different technical problems with the daguerreotype. For one, exposure times are typically 2 minutes. Also, a daguerreotype day shoot consists of six or eight plates. That is, six or eight chances to get a picture. A fickle process does not always cooperate, but when it does, the extreme detail capturing capability of the daguerreotype renders tones in form and shadow to a greater depth and richness than any other medium.

When I'm not making daguerreotypes, I manage a website, www.newdags.com which is "The portal to the world of contemporary daguerreotypes--the people who make them and how it is done."