Los Angeles photographer, Matthew Brandt, is a bit of a rock star in the photography world, challenging our ideas about photographic materials. His methodologies where process and subject matter are stirred up into whole new ways of seeing and thinking about the image, open the door to possibility. In his well-celebrated series, Lakes and Reservoirs, Brandt immersed his negatives in the water of his subject matter, therefore allowing the actual subject to physically impact the final image. For the series, Pictures From Flint (Bridges Over Flint), he toned silver gelatin prints with Flint’s contaminated tap water to call attention to the impurities in the Flint, Michigan, water supply.
His new series, 1864, recreates George N. Barnard’s 19th century images of a devastated, post-Sherman Atlanta. Using source imagery housed at the Library of Congress, he makes new albumen photographs from Barnard’s images. “Fortifying the foundational ingredients of the 19th-century albumen print — egg whites, silver nitrate, and salt — with peaches, sugar, flour, cinnamon, and butter, Brandt plays with external assumptions about the South, at the same time revealing a complex understanding of the complicated history his project explores”.
