In the Gallery: Contemporary Photography - Eric Baillies & Laurel Lueders

Madison, Wis. (March 29, 2016) – Edgewood College invites you to enjoy Contemporary Photography: Eric Baillies & Laurel Lueders in the Edgewood College Gallery.

Opening Reception: Friday, April 8, 2016 5:00 – 7:30 pm.

Exhibition: Friday, April 8 through Sunday, May 15, 2016.

About the Artists

Eric Baillies has been making an old techniques new again, learning to make tintypes through a series of experiments to handle and work with the chemicals necessary to produce tintype plates. 


Patented in 1854, the tintype or ferrotype became the first widely available and affordable photograph to the masses. Making a tintype is a wet plate process, which requires a dark room to prepare and develop the image following the exposure. The plate is flowed with collodion, soaked in silver nitrate, loaded into a camera, exposed, and then taken back to the darkroom to be developed and washed before fixing. Each tintype is a one of a kind direct positive that cannot be reproduced.

Baillies’ technique to consistently get a clean pour of the collodion and develop the plate balances the variables of technique, exposure, development, light, age of chemicals and temperature.

Laurel Lueders subverts the photographer’s role in accurate representation by purposefully playing with camera shake, extended shutter speed, and time-lapse – employing the camera as a mark- making tool. Her new painterly series of works showcase the camera’s ability to create lines with light. Suggesting that our spatial memory can be triggered simply through a line, grid, or abstract pattern.

Relying on the camera’s mechanism, Lueders exaggerates and manipulates its settings to convey a sense of location without inherent structure or fixed narrative. The abstract images reference architectural environments, unrecognizable to specific place or time, but undeniably suggestive of human presence. The hazy wash of the images creates the feeling of déjà vu, the experience of waking from a dream, or the attempt to recall a memory not fully formed. By playing with photography’s relationship to documentation, Lueders suggests that all images are newer versions of previous incarnations, and that beneath the surface is a larger history waiting to be unearthed.

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