Scully & Osterman: Gallery

Hesitation ©Mark Osterman, hand-tined ruby ambrotype

Described as a combination of performance art, surrealism and steam punk, Mark Osterman’s imagery draws its inspiration from uncommon life experiences and lays it before the viewer with the consummate skills of another era. Osterman, who actually performed traveling medicine shows from the back of a 1919 Model T Ford for twenty years, is generally known today as the foremost historian of historic photographic processes.

Osterman’s obsession with history and arcane technologies is combined with whimsy and a narrative that sets his images apart. When his work was described as surreal, Osterman replied, “the images are simply records of memories….. it’s my life that’s been surreal.”

Unlike others who are attracted to historical processes as a primitive alternative to digital, Osterman wields them for the subtleties only possible at the highest level of expertise.

…Like Dr. Bumstead, who dissembled and distracted with his patter and his pack of props, Osterman fully exploits the ambrotypes idiosyncrasies and the anomalies of lenticular vision to amaze his audience, often through what is implied rather than what is evident.

He shows off the tricks of both his trades – snake oil pitchman and imagemaker – without giving away the secrets of either.

Christine Tate, Photo Review, Vol. 26 No. 4.

Osterman, with a thunk, has thrown open his old showman’s trunk. As we peer inside, he begins a juggling of odd things and a persistent puzzling patter meant to misdirect our attention from his true art and intent. Only initiates will recognize it. None-the-less, a good time can be had by all with this show since it is obviously the work of a master... it does not matter of what. Dr. Bumstead’s medicine is not contained in the bottle.

No one thinks long of the age of a Stradivarius once it begins to be played by a virtuoso. So it should be with the ambrotype in Osterman’s hands.

Grant Romer, George Eastman House

Artifacts of a Curious Mind combines four bodies of work. A series called Artifacts of the Process is based on Osterman’s work in historic photographic processes. One plate, Hesitation, (shown above) illustrates the varnishing of an ambrotype at the point just before they occasionally catch fire, with disastrous results.

Free Show Tonight, (see below) is a set of eight sequential glimpses of a medicine show performed by gas light on a summer’s evening. Made on stained glass, they are called "ruby" ambrotypes; a process dating from the 1850s. They are also hand-tinted with pigments.

Taking the Rube, ©Mark Osterman ambrotype

The exhibit also includes luscious gold-toned, salted paper prints made from collodion on glass negatives.

Like Free Show Tonight, Osterman’s Confidence prints draw from memories of his traveling medicine show but are influenced by his childhood influences of Baron Von Munchausen, Rube Goldberg and Ogden Nash. Finally there are also prints from a collaboration of Osterman and a vaudeville show titled Amnesia Curiosa, (see below) two actors who shared Osterman’s interest in spirit photography. These are the only mages in the exhibition that are not self-portraiture, allowing Osterman a free hand to direct the performance with wonderful results.

Mark Osterman began research in historic photographic processes while attending the Kansas City Art Institute in the 1970s. He is currently the Process Historian for the Center for the Legacy of Photography at the George Eastman House International Museum of Photography and Film, where he recreates and teaches the technical evolution of photography from Niepce heliographs to gelatin emulsions.

The Rhodes Incident, ©Mark Osterman, 2006

The Rhodes Incident (from The Amnesia Curiosa series) -- In the small Pennsylvania borough of Boyertown, the Rhodes Opera House was a community theatre where plays, dramatic recitations and lantern shows were held for the local population on a regular basis.

On the evening of January 13, 1908, something went horribly wrong. That night during a presentation that included live action on stage and an interlude of slides projected by magic lantern, a foot light was knocked over catching the curtain on fire. At the same time, an acetylene gas hose had become detached from the magic lantern causing a conflagration made more horrible because the exit doors opened inward. More than one hundred and sixty people died in the fire, a quarter of the town’s population.

The Amnesia Curiosa series draws its name from a two-man vaudeville show performed by Geoff Sobelle and Trey Lyford that premiered in Philadelphia in 2006. The actors initially contacted me when they discovered my use of 19th century spirit photography in the Confidence series, also based on my own vaudeville experiences. The synergy of our studio sessions provided all of us with evocative images and allowed me to concentrate on the crafting of narratives I couldn’t easily do using my better known self-portrait approach.

Mark Osterman