Elizabeth Fennelly

Analog photography (water, light and chemicals) while never having really went away was revived counter to the ascendence of all things digital in the first decade of this teetering century. As an instructor at the School of Visual Arts I observed the surging generational interest around ‘wet plate’ and other outmoded alternative processes which challenged students with learning an authentic craft beyond tapping on a screen. SVA was the right place and time for Elizabeth (Liz) Fennelly (BFA ) who studied under artist's and educator's Dan Estabrook an important figure in the ‘Antiquarian Avant-Garde’ and the equally revered Lisa Elmaleh. Liz also interned for Estabrook at the Penumbra Foundation which required adept darkroom skills in and around the potentially dangerous chemistry used in the earliest years of the medium.

Liz resides in Portland Oregon an appropriate lush backdrop for her numerous photographic enterprises that includes a mobile tintype studio operated from a minivan. Business appears to be brisk and her commissioned portraits resonate with a neighborly rustic backyard vibe. In collaborating with her subjects an agreement is struck in terms of keeping very still for the length of time for the image to be exposed. I like to think that this exchange constitutes a form of time travel where every individual, group, object or melancholic landscape is saturated with what the filmmaker Jack Smith called ‘past-y-ness’, the patina of age. Liz's sitter's in submitting themselves to the hooded large format camera consciously (or not) project a nobility specific to photography's first century.

The receptive wet plate historicizes any image exposed to it, even that of Liz's own contemporary vehicle. Peripheral objects, forests and flora may also appear ancient or at least backdrops to the Civil War. I don't believe that Liz heavily art directs her environments (unless requested) which if overdetermined could get kitschy in a CSNY ‘Deja Vu’ LP cover waythey never do