In this feature, we showcase an image per week from our current exhibition, EXPOSURE: 13th Annual PRC Juried Exhibition, juried by Aperture’s Lesley A. Martin. In celebration of the last weeks of the show, we increased the frequency (and the excitement). This is the last image!

Today is the last day to see the PRC Juried show! We’re open today - Wednesday - from 10am - 6pm. (If you are out of town, browse our flicker set.)

This week’s image is from Ellen Susan and is a gorgeous wet plate image. Ellen has been getting a lot of attention as of late. Besides the multi-page spread in June’s PDN, American Photo’s excellent State of the Art blog has a very long post on her work. Congrats!

ABOUT : Ellen Susan (Savannah, GA) produces one-of-a-kind portraits of U.S. Army soldiers based in Southeast Georgia using the historical wet plate process. The majority of men and women in her “Soldier Portraits” have been deployed to Iraq two or three times since 2003. A graduate of MassArt and RISD, Susan has shown at the Houston Center for Photography; RISD|Works in Providence, RI; New Orleans Photo Alliance Gallery in New Orleans, LA; and has an upcoming solo show at Blue Sky Gallery in Portland, OR this summer.

From Susan’s statement:

“Soldier Portraits” - The wet collodion process was the primary photographic method from the 1840s through the 1880s, encompassing the dates of the American Civil War. The men and women photographed for the Soldier Portraits project are members of the U.S. Army based in Southeast Georgia. Most have deployed to Iraq one to three times since 2003. Many are in Iraq now. Army deployments now last 15 months.

The necessarily long exposures of this slow process often result in an intensity of gaze, and the grainless, highly detailed surface brings out minute details of each individual. These attributes, combined with the historical military associations made me feel that the process could be a meaningful way to photograph contemporary soldiers and to provide a counterpoint to the anonymous representations seen in newspapers and on television. I wanted to produce physically enduring, visually arresting images of people who are being sent repeatedly into a war zone.

ABOVE IMAGE: Ellen Susan, SPC Shaun Kramer, 2007, from the series “Soldier Portraits,” Aluminotype, 10 x 8 inches, courtesy of the artist

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 2nd, 2008 at 10:19 am and is filed under Image a Week, PRC Exhibitions. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.