Rangefinder Magazine

November 2000

Photo History Comes to Life In a Gettysburg Gallery
by Bill Walker

hen George Eastman was still a toddler, photography was already a rapidly developing art. Some 20 years before the Rochester, NY bank clerk began selling his dry plates, photographers were making their own sensitized emulsions on glass or blackened tin plates.
They pioneered many illustrative techniques used today in portraiture and photojournalism—and they did it with cranky, non-standard emulsions and only the sun for light. Their crude cameras and lenses were big and bulky without f/ stops or shutters. When they left their galleries (studios), they carried everything in a one-horsepower “what is it?” wagon that had storage for equipment, chemicals and plates in front and a traveling darkroom in the back.

Their creativity is demonstrated in their portraits of famous people, their battlefield photographs and such photojournalism as the sequence of pictures showing the execution of the Lincoln conspirators and Captain Henry Wirz, former commander of the Andersonville prison. There was no TV to display their work. Woodcuts of their photographs were the only means of print media display.

But there was a huge market for their pictures in the north. Thousands of prints were sold by mail-order in the form of stereographs, large prints and cartes de visite. The cartes were small calling-card-sized prints of famous people that were bought by the thousands and saved in albums like baseball cards are today. Stereographs, which were the TV of their day, brought the ugliness of battlefields and casualties to viewers in three dimensions. Their use was common in homes well into this century.

While many of their images remain, their collodion wet-plate photography techniques have been obscured by time as film and modern cameras took over. Their ornate galleries evolved into modern portrait studios, and their news pictures evolved into modern photojournalism. But they laid the groundwork for much of photography as it’s practiced today.

Now fast-forward 135 years to downtown Gettysburg, PA, where an 1860s-style photographer makes his own plates, shifts a bulky camera around a sunlit gallery and makes exposures by taking the lens cap off and putting it back on.
The photographer is Rob Gibson, a Civil War re-enactor turned photographer. He is well known by other Eastern U.S. re-enactors, many of whom he has photographed in the field in the last four years.

“As a kid, I was fascinated by the pictures in Miller’s Pictorial History of the Civil War,” Gibson said. “After I started re-enacting, I wanted to try to re-create some of those pictures, but I had no way to do it.”
It was the beginning of a dream. A dream that wasn’t easy to reach.

Very few people were using the wet- plate process when he started, so he had to find formulas and descriptions in old books he found in antique stores. He also got first-hand experience at a George Eastman House demonstration, and credits Mark and France Scully Osterman (commercial wet-plate photographers who make modern pictures) with helping him through the early growing pains when things all seemed to be going wrong.

Quantity measurements were different back then, so he had to find antique scales and beakers with the old measurements. Then he scoured the shops to buy cameras, lenses and other equipment that actually was used with the process. He was surprised at how much of it still existed—gathering dust in out-of-the-way corners. Then he built his own “what is it?” wagon and headed for re-enactments to make portraits of soldiers as tintypes or ambrotypes.
As his experience grew, he started dreaming of the gallery.

Early in 1999, Gibson left the security of a cushy industrial job to build his dream. It opened last May 29.
Stepping into the gallery is like opening a 135-year-old time capsule. Walking up a long, creaky stairway, you notice antique, embossed wallpaper reminiscent of old pressed-tin ceilings found in only a few old buildings today. People in period costume greet you at the top. Entering the waiting room you see framed prints of many Gibson pictures. There’s a glassed cabinet in which are samples and prices for images the gallery makes. Because they are unique, Gibson’s portraits command premium prices.

In a central room are two racks of antique clothes that customers can wear in their sittings. There are no modern fashions in Gibson’s pictures.
Dominating the gallery is the bright, white-painted operating room in which the images are made. Gibson installed a fifteen-foot skylight in the room as his only light source. This is a copy of the skylights at the original galleries.
There are no floodlights or strobes and, obviously, no night pictures.

On one side of the operating room are props among which are chairs, a column, books, tables, a picket fence and a clock much like the famous “Brady clock.” The clock is a classic prop used in many of the Brady gallery’s portraits of famous people, and always set at 10 minutes before 12:00.

Gibson’s gallery, trying to be as authentic as possible, also sets the clock at ten minutes before twelve before a picture is made with it.

In the custom of the time, everybody is called by his or her last name, i.e., Mr. Benson, Mr. Davenport and. Of course, Mr. Gibson. All seem to live in a time long past.

As the sitter is being posed, a head rest is positioned behind his or her head. This immobilizes the person for the long exposure. It’s called the “immobilizer” and this one was actually used in galleries a long time ago.

After posing the sitter, Mr. Gibson calls for the plate. Mr. Benson emerges from the darkroom with a plate holder in his hand and the moment of truth is at hand. Mr. Gibson instructs the sitter to stillness, removes the lens cap from the big camera and seconds later he replaces it. The sunlight is bright this day so the exposure is only about five seconds.

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The exposed plate is rushed to the darkroom and developed, and in about five minutes the subject sees the picture as Mr. Gibson holds it up to a piece of black cloth. The cloth causes the thin negative image to pop out like a positive. As a negative, it is the basis for prints. Framed, or backed up by a black background, it looks like a positive (called an ambrotype.)

If the image is acceptable, Mr. Davenport dries the plate and coats it with a bead of amber varnish. If it is not acceptable, Mr. Gibson will re-pose the sitter and make another plate.

Most of the gallery’s portraits are made on glass because it can be used either as a negative or positive. However, to be historically accurate, if a soldier wants a “likeness”, he will make it on blackened tin as a tintype.

The gallery’s appointment book is filling rapidly. Gibson regularly photographs Civil War re-enactors in their uniforms. There is some walk-in tourist trade, and Gettysburg residents often stop by for pictures.

But Gibson’s work isn’t entirely portraits. On days when the gallery is closed, he gets out into the Gettysburg Battlefield to try to re-create some of the startling pictures taken by Alexander Gardner, Timothy O’Sullivan and James Gibson following the bloody battle. These eventually will be for sale as prints or stereographic cards.
The collection is growing. And there is no shortage of historic sites in his neighborhood.

Will he make it financially? So far the gallery’s business is booming. Even if his customer base stays primarily among re-enactors, popularity in re-enacting is growing and there will always be new troops wanting their “likenesses.” And he’s not even scratched the surface of the types of work he can sell.

This author is betting on him.

Bill Walker has written about photography and its techniques for over 30 years, first as a public relations man for Ansco (now extinct) and for 15 years as a freelancer for Eastman Kodak. Bill died unexpectedly earlier in the year. In his final years of semi-retirement he lived aboard a boat and wrote only about subjects that interested him.