Lecture Series: Photography's Past, Present and Future with Scully & Osterman

Date: 12 January, 6:00-8:00 PM

Registration Fees: 10 QAR

Registration link: https://ticketing.qacreates.com/event/scully-osterman-lecture-1-the-invention-of-photo-x5w56n

In this lecture, the earliest observations of light by the ancients leading to light-based drawings are introduced. The first discoveries of cameras and chemicals that can produce an image are illustrated along with the earliest photographic processes produced in the first decades of the 19th century. Samples will be provided for hands-on inspection.

Date: 13 January, 6:00-8:00 PM

Registration Fees: 10 QAR

Registration link: https://ticketing.qacreates.com/event/scully-osterman-lecture-2-evolution-of-photograp-afg4z9

In this lecture, the invention and adoption of the daguerreotype, calotype and wet collodion processes are presented, showing how they produced unique images and negatives for secondary photographic prints. By the end of the 1870s photography in some form had been adopted by most of the industrialized world. This lecture includes descriptions and illustrations of these processes. Samples will be provided for hands-on inspection.

Date: 14 January, 6:00-8:00 PM

Registration Fees: 10 QAR

Registration link: https://ticketing.qacreates.com/event/scully-osterman-lecture-3-photography-and-the-mi-4txme4

In this lecture, expeditionary photographers who documented the Middle East in the earliest decades of photography are highlighted, using daguerreotype plates, calotype negatives and collodion negatives for salted paper prints and albumen prints. These are the earliest photographic records of the Middle East and are references for how the landscapes have both changed and also remained the same in some instances. This lecture includes slides of original images in the George Eastman Museum Photography Collection.

Date: 15 January, 6:00-8:00 PM

Registration Fees: 10 QAR

Registration link: https://ticketing.qacreates.com/event/scully-osterman-lecture-4-the-evolution-of-moder-sezl24

In this lecture, the introduction of animal gelatin–based photography by the end of the 1870s is explored, including English innovations and improvements made in America, France and Germany. Gelatin emulsions were applied to glass plates, on paper for photographic prints, and eventually on clear flexible films as they continue to be made to this day. This lecture includes imagery and explanations featuring coating of glass plates and flexible film. Samples will be provided for hands-on Inspection.

Date: 17 January, 6:00-8:00 PM

Registration Fees: 10 QAR

Registration link: https://ticketing.qacreates.com/event/scully-osterman-lecture-5-natures-second-course--g9vxpz

In this lecture, France presents her Sleep and Bed Series, the processes used, and those influences which led up to creating these bodies of work. For Sleep, she photographed friends, acquaintances and loved ones sleeping in her skylight studio. These images are intimate and unpretentious portraits, captured when her subjects are actually sleeping, and at their most vulnerable. They offer contradictions: a moment of innocence and serenity, and perhaps a reminiscence of death (or post-mortem), yet full of movement and energy. A continuation of Sleep, the Bed Series removes the subject, inviting the viewer to become the “sleeper.” As ones individual “home base,” the bed offers the nightly promise of comfort, rest, warmth and security.

Date: 19 January, 6:00-8:00 PM

Registration Fees: 10 QAR

Registration link: https://ticketing.qacreates.com/event/scully-osterman-lecture-6-anatomy-the-work-of-ma-d7taub

In this lecture, the evolution of Mark’s most recent series “Anatomy” is covered, including his earliest use of historic photographic processes and the influences that lead up to this unusal body of work. The imagery is based on dismantling a 1923 model T Ford car. Mark observed that many of the old parts and the reasons for replacing them were metaphores for human body parts at a time he was dealing with his 95 year old father going through medical issues. More about human anatomy than an old car, the work is visually powerful and provocotive. These images were made using the 1850s–1870s era wet collodion negative process. The glass plate negatives were then inverted digitally for the production of digital pigment prints, a technical marriage spanning over 150 years.

Date: 20 January, 6:00-8:00 PM

Registration Fees: 10 QAR

Registration link: https://ticketing.qacreates.com/event/scully-osterman-lecture-7-sun-sketches-in-the-tw-tygb2z

In this lecture, France discusses her first collaboration with Mark using the 1830s Photogenic Drawing process in-camera to create two bodies of work.

In the first series, The Light at Lacock, the Ostermans created a body of work using Wm Henry Fox Talbot’s Photogenic Drawing process with their own "mouse-trap" cameras at Lacock Abbey and its environs — using the same process and type of cameras used by Talbot. Rather than replicate exactly what Talbot had done, they made new images to celebrate the negative, the primary capture in a camera that has become virtually obsolete with the advent of digital imaging. What was discovered during the project changed their approach completely.

Several years later, they traveled to the Arizona Desert to shoot a second body of work using the same process, Sun Traps in the Arizona Desert. These hand-coated paper negatives were exposed using simple cameras with primitive lenses and long exposures. They were inspired by the desert sunlight and shadows on surrounding scenery to create new colors in the exhibit prints.