David Sokosh – The American Scholar

After working within the darkroom for practically 20 years, David Sokosh started to experiment with earlier photographic strategies comparable to tintype, the place a picture is straight made on a metallic sheet. “My interest in the past—in old technologies and late 19th- or early 20th-century design and art—led me to these historic processes,” he says. “What was photography like for people in 1840, in 1880, in 1910? What was going on in America? How do people interact with photographic technology at different times?” He spent a number of years practising with tintypes, even utilizing them to shoot a style function for The New York Times. But when the pandemic struck, Sokosh discovered himself eager to create with out the cumbersome tools required by the medium. He toyed with the concept of collodion prints (an early course of for creating images on glass utilizing ether) however finally settled on cyanotypes (the identical monochrome course of used for blueprints) as a result of their requirement of solely two chemical compounds is “certainly lighter on the health of the photographer and on the environment.” This led him to invent a technique to mix his love for darkroom images with the chemical technique of cyanotypes: He shoots movie with a digital camera from the Fifties, manipulates the negatives in Photoshop, then develops the pictures onto paper handled with cyanotype chemical compounds.

Sokosh’s ongoing sequence Past/Present-Memory/Loss explores themes of remembrance and nostalgia by still-life compositions, portraits, and self-portraits. The nonetheless lifes embody daffodils in a glass urn and a classical bust trapped inside a bell jar alongside azaleas and a ceramic mug that reads Forget me. The portraits, in the meantime, nod to literary figures: Ophelia carrying flowers related to reminiscence and Sixteenth-century abortifacients; Achilles and Patroclus organized in a pietà composition. Sokosh was impressed by his mom and grandmother, who had been each identified with Alzheimer’s, and whose reminiscences Sokosh watched slip away. We dwell in a tradition obsessive about “trying to stay young, trying to stay current,” he explains. “If something that is preserved forever under a dome”—just like the bust within the bell jar— “is kind of airless and untouched, it stays young forever. It stays the same, but it’s not doing anything. It’s not all alive. It’s not functioning in the way it was intended to. So what’s better: to live and get used up and die or to stay eternally youthful?”