makers Be Still A photographer captures small moments in time John Myers
It’s 10:05 a.m. and we’re in Jenn Libby’s comfortably busy Hungerford Building studio, sitting at a simple table in the rainy-gray light of a Rochester fall day. “It’s a beautiful morning,” she says, looking out the window. A genuine statement of appreciation for what we’re given. And also, as I would realize further into our conversation, the crux of her artistic perspective. Libby is a photographer who primarily uses the wet-plate collodion process to capture her images—a process she was introduced to at the George Eastman House’s Visual Studies Workshop, and has since taught at the VSW and Snow College in Ephraim, Utah (she has also taught photography at the U of R, Nazareth and Mansfield University in Pennsylvania). Popular during the Civil War, the process was invented by Frederick Scott Archer in 1848, and essentially replaced the more expensive, complex calotype and daguerrotype photographic processes of the day. Even so, people still had to sit like statues for the image to be sharp. “It’s a different way of seeing,” says Libby of the collodian-captured images. “The process is only sensitive to UV, or the blue end of the spectrum, so it reads differently than how people were used to seeing even black-and-white film. People look slightly different. It’s another way of seeing that you can’t see with your naked eye because it’s stripped of color. A translation.” A series of portraits of men in different period dress hangs on the wall near where we’re sitting. She points out that the man in each is actually the same man, holding the portrait of his previous persona. “I wasn’t super interested in taking portraits until I started learning about the collodian process,” she says. “People either love it or they don’t. To some it’s very dark. But this is something different [than digital photography].” The idea of seeing things differently is embodied in Libby’s art as well. Whether it’s her collection of jars housing lantern slides, photograms of found objects, or handmade books, Libby’s focus is on the matter, or artifacts, of memory and our perception of them. “I’d see pictures of me as a kid, at my birthday party, and I wouldn’t remember it. … I mean, I can name some of the kids. I can remember them, but there’s this artifact that says this happened, and that this is real, but the photograph remembers and I don’t. So there was this frustration. I feel like I have a bad memory, so I would keep objects as sort of tokens or talismans of memories of things that happened.” Surrounding herself with these memories, Libby is easily reminded to stay present. “What draws me to art is trying to get people to be aware and to look. I don’t try to make any big sweeping statements. I am visually stimulated, so when I see things that I get excited about, I want to capture it and freeze it and show it to people.” Much like sitting in front of her camera. In the end, you’ve got to hold still for a bit to capture all the detail. To see things a little differently—even our weather. jennlibby.com —Matt Smythe
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