(Alphabetical order)

Jo Babcock
San Francisco, CA USA
jobabcock.com
Jo Babcock was born in 1954 in St. Louis, and graduated from the San Francisco Art Institute (BFA 1976, MFA 1979). Since 1977, Babcock has experimented prodigiously with pinhole cameras and other handmade “low-tech” devices. He has created cameras out of an array of objects including suitcases, MSG cans, a guitar case, a Shinola tin, a VW bus and a classic Airstream motorhome, to produce both small and mural scale photographs. His one-of-a-kind paper negatives are distinctive for their distortion of form and color. Babcock’s imagery of landscapes is transformed by his process into an eerie, painterly world of emotional dreamscapes and startling familiarity. Jo Babcock’s work has been exhibited internationally, including exhibitions at the Brooklyn Museum, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Alternative Museum, the Center for the Arts at Yerba Buena Gardens, and the Sao Paulo Bienal.Babcock teaches Alternative Processes in Photography at the Academy of Art University in San Francisco.

Craig J. Barber
Woodstock, NY USA
craigbarber.com
Craig J. Barber is a photographer who travels and works exclusively with the pinhole format and focuses of the cultural landscape. During the past 10 years he has focused his camera on Viet Nam, Havana, and the Catskill region of New York State. In each, documenting a culture in rapid transition and fading from memory. His work has been exhibited throughout the United States, Europe and Latin America and is represented in several prominent museum and private collections including the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the Victoria and Albert Museum, London; the Brooklyn Art Museum; the George Eastman House, Rochester, NY; and Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Buenos Aires, Aregentia, among others. He has received several grants including the Seattle Arts Comission, the Polaroid Corporation and the New York Foundation for the Arts. In 2006 Umbrage Editions published his book, ”Ghosts in the Landscape: Vietnam Revisited.”

Laura Blacklow
Cambridge, MA USA
www.lblacklow.com
Laura Blacklow is the author of “New Dimensions in Photo Processes, A Step by Step Manual for Alternative Techniques” (Focal Press, an imprint of Elsevier: 4th ed., 2007). Ms. Blacklow was the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Regional Fellowship for Works on Paper, the St. Botolph Cub’s Morton C. Bradley Award in Color for her pastelled digital photos, Polaroid Corporation’s Artist Support Program, and the Massachusetts Artists’ Foundation Fellowship for her hand-colored black-and-white photographs. She is on the faculty of the Massachusetts College of Art and the School of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and has also taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University. Visit her website at www.lblacklow.com.

Alan Greene
Cambridge, MA USA
Alan Greene started making photographs for artistic purposes in 1983, when he enrolled in a college-level photographic course as an elective. Leaving art school in 1987 with a B.F.A., he took up various employments: camera repair technician, commercial photographer’s assistant, ecclesiastical glazier. In 1992, he entered graduate school. There, he was surprised to learn that digital photography was considered to be the way of the future, and he resolved to make photographs from scratch should the occasion arise. Graduating with an M.F.A. in 1995, he has since had numerous solo and group exhibitions,and taught photography as an adjunct professor and a leader of workshops. In 1998, he began experimenting with the 1840s-era calotype process and building his own cameras and lenses. This culminated in the 2001 publication of a technical manual, Primitive Photography. In 2002-03, he was commissioned by the Maison Européenne de la Photographie, Paris, to make a series of calotype views of the North End of Boston as part of their 2003-04 exhibit, Rome 1850: Le cercle des artistes photographes du Caffè Greco. A catalogue including examples of his work and an interview accompanied the exhibit. In 2004, an article he wrote outlining the history and practice of developed-out salt printing circa 1843-66 was published in the journal Études photographiques. Most recently, he has contributed to the Encyclopedia of 19th Century Photography and the Vocabulaire technique de la photographie.

Patricia Katchur/Center for Alternative and Historic Processes
New York, NY USA
cfaahp.org
Patricia Katchur was born and raised in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. She studied photography, philosophy and art history in Rochester, New York and Salzburg, Austria, graduating with a BFA. After college, she moved to Tucson, Arizona where she was very active in the budding downtown art scene and a board member of GPI (Group for Photographic Intentions) and the Tucson Partnership. In 1993, she transplanted to New York City and was, for 12 years, the driving force behind Sixty Eight Degrees black and white photo lab. Currently Patricia is the director of the Center for Alternative and Historic Processes (CFAAHP). She is also concentrating on the development of the Ebauche Foundation for the Arts. Her photographs document the changing scape of urban and rural areas, life’s little forget-me-nots and other quiet moments.

Terry King
London, UK
hands-on-pictures.com
In the mid 1970s Terry King decided to change careers. he had been a career civil servant. As preparation for the career change, he chose an area of photography which interested him and then worked obsessively to ensure that he was very good at it. This was gum bichromate printing in terms of taking the photographs and making the prints. By 1982 he had been awarded fellowship of the Royal Photographic Society for gum bichromate prints. As a result of the lectures he was giving, he was asked if he would design and run a yearlong workshop on alternative processes. This workshop became the basis of the revival of alternative processes in the UK. The workshops went under the title of ‘From Wedgwood to Bromoil’. A significant proportion of those now practising or teaching alternative processes have now been taught by Terry’s students or their students. It was designed around the historical development of photography from Wedgwood’s experiments to photogravure. In preparing effctive methods of treating alternative photography Terry set out to simplify . As an example, his method of gum printing achieves beautiful prints far more efficiently than the currently received approach. This simplification developed into his programme of ‘retro-invention’. with significant developments such as a reassessment of Niepce’s ‘First photograph’ in asphaltum and revolutionary methods of making both blue prints and gold prints to which Terry gave the name ‘cyanotype rex’ and ‘chrysotype rex’. Terry also ran workshops and lectured at universities and colleges around the UK. His work is in the collections of the Royal Photographic Society and the National. Museum of Photography. In 1997 he started the Alternative Photography International Symposium which developed a pattern of meeting in alternate years in the UK and in Santa Fe in the US.

Mike Robinson
Toronto, ON CAN
centurydarkroom.com
Mike Robinson is the proprietor of Mike Robinson’s Century Darkroom, in Toronto, Canada. His daguerreian art is in the collections of The Portrait Gallery of Canada, The Art Gallery of Ontario, The Hallmark Fine Art Collection in Kansas City, The Snite Museum of Art at Notre Dame University, The George Eastman House International Museum of Photography and in many private collections. Mike teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in 19th century photographic process at Ryerson University in Toronto. Mike has also taught workshops in the 19th century processes at The National Archives of Canada, The George Eastman House, The Amon Carter Museum, and The University of Notre Dame. His work has been reproduced in several issues of The Daguerreian Annual including a feature article, The Making of Twenty Daguerreotypes in 2001. His work has also been reproduced in Discover Magazine, Photo Ed, and Art & Antiques Magazine. His chapter on albumen printing has been published in Coming into Focus. His research into the working methodology of Southworth & Hawes has been published in the exhibition catalogue, Young America: The Daguerreotypes of Southworth & Hawes. More information is available at www.centurydarkroom.com

Tom Persinger
Pittsburgh, PA USA
photos.tompersinger.com
Tom founded and directs f295 an international organization with more than 1,000 members interested in furthering the dialogue regarding the art of lensless photography and the craft of alternative and adaptive photographic processes. He departs from the common pursuit of using photography to capture single decisive moments. His photographs are often the result of extended exposures. The artifacts of motion revealed by these images show the world as fundamentally impermanent and constantly changing. He refers to this as a continuity of moments.He has been a coordinating committee member of Worldwide Pinhole Photography Day since 2005. He has been published in Ag, Afterimage, Black and White Photography (UK), and View Camera. He will be delivering introductory comments a the symposium.

*Barbara Ess had been scheduled to speak at this event but cancelled her plans to attend Wednesday April 18 for personal reasons. We are thrilled to add Laura Blacklow to our list of speakers. She will be delivering her talk: Convergence: PhotoGraphics..