2026 SPE Annual Conference: Catalyst for Exchange
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print this pageBreaking All the Rules
S. Gayle Stevens
Friday, October 18 - 10:00AM to 10:45AM
UNCC Center City Building // 201 Auditorium
There are three important things in creating art: personal vision, mastery of the medium and the willingness to explore beyond those parameters (breaking the rules). Unlike current wetplaters emulating nineteenth century photography, I have chosen to express a more modernist aesthetic. In the years that I have worked in wet plate collodion, I have been told numerous times what can and cannot be done with this process and have proved them wrong. We must always question when we are told something cannot be done and if the answer is insufficient, then push forward and either prove or refute. I have refuted many suppositions. As I tell my students, don't believe anything anyone tells you until you test it yourself. My work stands as a testament that the collodion process can support a number of deviations from the norm. I shoot pinhole cameras, Holga cameras; I make camera-less photography, and chemigrams. I use old developer, which should not produce images, safelights that are too bright but produce mysterious stories. I prove or disprove, I learn.
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S. Gayle Stevens
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