Michelle Bates

Seattle, WA USA
www.michellebates.net
Michelle Bates has been playing with Holgas since 1991. She teaches toy camera workshops at schools around the US, including the International Center of Photography, Photographic Center Northwest, Maine Media Workshops, and Julia Dean Workshops. Her images and writings are included in Creative Vision: Digital & Traditional Methods for Inspiring Innovative Photography by Jeremy Webb, Photographic Possibilities by Robert Hirsch, The Elements of Photography: Understanding and Creating Sophisticated Images by Angela Faris Belt. Bates is the author of Plastic Cameras: Toying with Creativity, the first comprehensive guide to the plastic camera genre, published in 2006 by Focal Press.

Dan Estabrook

New York, NY USA
www.pathetica.net
For almost twenty years, Dan Estabrook has been using nineteenth-century photographic techniques to make contemporary art. In the last few years he has focused on working with hand-altered calotypes and salt prints. He has exhibited widely and has received several awards, including an Artist’s Fellowship from the National Endowment of the Arts in 1994. He is represented by the Catherine Edelman Gallery in Chicago , Daniel Cooney Fine Art in New York and Jackson Fine Art in Atlanta.

Robb Kendrick

San Miguel de Allende, Mexico
www.robbkendrick.com/
Robb Kendrick is a photographer whose work appears regularly in National Geographic. Kendrick’s true passion has become wet plate photography, a historic photo technique used during the mid-19th century. The tintype photos made with the wet-plate process are each one of a kind as they are all handmade from start to finish. He is also working in daguerrotype, ultra-large format and also combining audio and video with his tintype imagery.

His most recent wet plate project documents the working cowboy in 14 Western States, Mexico and Canada for National Geographic December 2007 issue. The photos are collected in a new book Still: Cowboys at the Start of the 21st Century. Another recent book from Cloverleaf Press is titled Changelings, a collection of Mexican mummies photographed on tintypes, with forward by Thomas Lynch. Kendrick’s first book of tintypes was Revealing Character, which is also a touring exhibition that is being featured at eight major museums in the U.S.

Kendrick moved to San Miguel de Allende, a colonial town in Central Mexico two years ago with his wife, writer Jeannie Ralston, and their two boys.

Jarosław Klupś

Poznan, Poland
www.klups.free.art.pl
Jaroslaw Klups Graduate of MA studies at Academy of Fine Arts in Poznan, Poland (2000-2005). Since 2005 - assistant of professor Witold Przymuszala at Studio of Propeadeutics of Art Photography Technics of Photography Department at Multimedia Communication Faculty. Participant of numerous exhibitions (Boston & New Bedford in USA; Szczecin, Warsaw, Poznan, Krakow, Gdansk & Lodz in Poland; Bratislava in Slovakia), leads workshops and presentations referenced to alternative technics of photographic imaging. Works within classical photography and multimedia installations also with historic processes like glass negatives, daguerreotypes and wet plate collodion and self-made cameras. His works & texts was published in a book “On pinhole photography” by Zbigniew Tomaszczuk (Wroclaw 2004) and numerous art magazines & catalogues.

Martha Madigan

Philadelphia, PA USA
www.marthamadigan.com
Martha Madigan, an internationally known Philadelphia artist, is best known for her exquisite solar photograms that refer to, record, and/or transform aspects of nature and the human figure. In her work, Madigan seeks to find “the essential truth in the teachings of nature, death and life as a continuum, the temporary nature of the body, and the struggle between human desire and spiritual evolution.” For more than thirty years Martha Madigan has explored a variety of photographic light sensitive materials from the earliest cyanotype process to the latest technology in digital color photography.

A tenured Professor at Tyler School of Art, Temple University, Philadelphia, Martha Madigan has actively exhibited in this country and abroad. Since 2004 she has been on the faculty of Temple University Rome where she has taught advanced drawing and photography to graduate and undergraduate students. Her work is represented in prestigious museum collections including The Art Institute of Chicago, The Detroit Institute of Arts, The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Madigan has received numerous awards of distinction including a National Endowment for the Arts grant and a Leeway Grant for Excellence in Photography. Martha Madigan is represented by Jeffrey Fuller Fine Art, Ltd., Philadelphia, and Michael Rosenfeld Gallery, New York.

Elizabeth Opalenik

San Francisco, CA USA
www.opalenik.com/
Elizabeth Opalenik is known for her sensual images in the Mordançage process, handpainted black and white, infrared films, Polaroid manipulations and specialized toning. With limitless creativity Elizabeth has found her voice as a photographic artist, learning that all good photographs are self-portraits that lie somewhere between imagination and dreams. Though working both digitally and with film, Elizabeth is dedicated to her one of a kind images created in the Mordançage process that she learned from the French master, Jean Pierre Sudre.

Elizabeth has recently published her first monograph “Poetic Grace: Elizabeth Opalenik Photographs 1979-2007”. The book contains many innovative images in the mordançage process, where she has added her signature style of lifting the silver emulsion from the papers surface, rearranging the skin of her image and settling the drapes back onto the photographs surface. Sudre once wrote “Elizabeth’s new images bring a new way to see her subjects as if dressed by a new Lacroix, but in fact by new graphics, mysterious and poetic and where Elizabeth becomes Photographer, Portraitist-Mordançeuse.”

Her work is collected and exhibited in museum, gallery and private collections internationally. A sought after educator she teaches workshops in France, Italy, Argentina, Mexico and the US privately on the portrait, figure and alternative processes and has been teaching multiple workshops more than 20 years in conjunction with The Maine Media Workshops, The Santa Fe Photographic Workshops, and National Geographic Expeditions among others. Poetic Grace and other portfolios by Elizabeth have been featured in Zoom, Camera Arts, Black and White Magazine, PDN, Collectors Photography, Edifice Progresso and Silvershotz. In June 2008, Black and White Magazine also featured an article on Mordançage with Elizabeth and Jean Pierre Sudre.

She is represented by Verve Gallery in Santa Fe, Gallery 291 in San Francisco and Gallery DeForest in Ashland.

Mark Osterman

Rochester, NY USA
www.collodion.org
Mark Osterman is an historian and modern master of wet-plate collodion photography. He currently serves as Process Historian for the Advanced Residency Program for Photograph Conservation at George Eastman House in Rochester, NY. In 2009, Osterman will begin work with The Center for the Legacy of Photography at Eastman House.

Osterman’s most recent writings on the subject of 19th century photography include the 19th century chapter for the Focal Encyclopedia of Photography and a chapter on making gelatin emulsions for the Book of Alternative Photographic Processes, by Christopher James.

He began research in historic photographic processes while attending the Kansas City Art Institute in the 1970s. and currently teaches the technical evolution of photography from Niepce heliographs to making gelatin emulsions.

As an artist, his series, “Confidence,” based on a traveling medicine show he performed for twenty years, received commendation in Photo Review , After Image and Zoom magazines. His next exhibit will be held at Tilt Gallery, Phoenix, AZ in March 2009.

His work has been featured in Photography’s Antiquarian Avant-Garde, The New Wave in Old Process Photography by Lyle Rexer, Coming into Focus by John Barnier, The Book of Alternative Photographic Processes by Christopher James (both editions), Le Vocabulaire Technique de la Photographie by Anne Cartier-Bresson (2008), and the third edition of Photographic Possibilities, by Robert Hirsch (2008).

Osterman’s images are in the collections of the Museum of Fine Art, Houston; The Nelson-Atkins Museum, Kansas City; George Eastman House International Museum of Photography; Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas; Museum of Western Virginia, Roanoke; Michener Museum, Doylestown, PA and numerous private collections.

Osterman has given lectures, demonstrations and workshops throughout the United States, Canada, Mexico, Japan and Europe. He published the quarterly publication The Collodion Journal with his wife, France Scully Osterman from 1995 to 2002.

He is represented by Howard Greenberg Gallery, NYC and Tilt Gallery, Phoenix, AZ.

Carol Panaro-Smith & James Hajicek

Phoenix, AZ USA
www.alchemy-studio.net
James Hajicek and Carol Panaro-Smith have been collaborating for almost ten years in both their creative work and in the teaching of workshops both in this country and abroad. James has been a Professor of Photography at Arizona State University for over 30 years and Carol is the founding director of Alchemy Studio Workshops in Phoenix, Arizona. They are founding directors of Art Intersection, a multi disciplinary workshop program that takes place in the summer in Vitiana, Italy They have received numerous grants and awards and their creative work is in major public and private collections in the United States, France, Amsterdam, and Japan. Their work is represented by Kevin Longino, Greenwich CN, Etherton Gallery, Tucson, AZ, Photo- eye, Santa Fe, NM, Tilt gallery, Phoenix, AZ, Joseph Bellows, La Jolla, CA, and Oswald Gallery, Jackson Hole, WY.