Rebecca
Hackemann

Nostalgia Technika

These camera-less wet collodion (tintype) photograms on metal speak to our cultural and personal nostalgia for lost technologies' cultural tropes such as the homemade cassette tape or the compact CD. This process – the wet collodion - reflects the subject matter by using an even older process to talk about process itself. The work centers on the disappearing methods of analog technology in populist and professional areas of various fields - music, photography, the sciences and even the home. Camera-less photography is often read as the ultimate rejection of the retinal image plane (and the camera's ability to represent), questioning it as a language, emerging from 1970s conceptual work. This new method serves also a metaphor for our nostalgia for the tactile materiality of the print, the questionable condition of digital culture, and the ways in which our digital footprints, trackable as they are may or may not have staying power. On a formal level these works purposefully seek to expose the flaws of the wet collodion and to evoke the very chemistry the photograms are made onto. Some of the works shimmer silvery (in their unvarnished final state) with matte highlights and glossy black area, formed by the substrate plate. They are framed in floating (box) glass frames.