The dreamers in France Scully Osterman’s Sleep series sink deep into rumpled sheets, surrendering to a twilight world that is among the most mysterious and desirable of human states. Fittingly, Osterman produces these contemplative works using a time-consuming process that is almost as old as photography itself: she is among a handful of photographers today recognized as a master of wet-plate collodion photography, which employs glass plates that are coated with a noxious, syrupy mixture, then dipped in a silver nitrate solution, and exposed in a view camera while still damp. When it was introduced in the late 1840s, wet-plate collodion created a revolution in photography, not only because it allowed the production of numerous prints from a negative, but because it produced beautiful, highly detailed prints. Osterman’s lush prints in deep brown tones have a sense of presence that makes her subjects seem embodied in the work. Their sensual surfaces emphasize the sexual association we have with beds, and her choice of subject matter harkens to the Victorian age, when sleep was regarded as a form of death and eerie deathbed photographs of loved ones were common.

Osterman is an artist, teacher, and guest scholar at the George Eastman House in Rochester, New York, and gives lectures, demonstrations, and workshops throughout the United States, Europe, and Japan. Her work is included in the collections of the Museum of Fine Art, Houston; the George Eastman House International Museum of Photography; and the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell University, among others. She and her husband Mark Osterman produce The Collodion Journal, dedicated to keeping the art of wet-plate photography alive.

This exhibition is supported in part by a generous grant from the The Efroymson Family Fund.