Nathaniel Gibbons is a man either ahead of his time, or way behind it. As a photographer who specializes in a technique that had its heyday 100 years ago, yet is slowly regaining popularity, he is without question part of what he calls the antiquarian avant-garde.
By means of an introduction to “wet plate” photography, recall Civil War–era photos you’ve seen: Shot in grayish-black and silver-white, with shades of brown, the subject stands in sharp contrast to the background. The image may be of a soldier, or perhaps a family, or maybe just some bucolic nature scene. The details are so stark, you feel you are there even if “there” is 120 years ago. Welcome to the photography, and the world, of Nate Gibbons, wet-plate photographer, firefighter and fire inspector, handset printer, organic farmer, Mayflower descendant, beekeeper and associate fellow at Yale.
Born in Greenwich and raised in Westport by a stockbroker father and a copywriter/charity-worker mother, Nate recalls a childhood of comfort and creativity. (He still lives in Westport, with his wife, Lizz.) He attended Choate and Yale, where he majored in geology but also indulged his passion for photography, particularly formats larger than 35 mm. He and a favorite instructor would wake up at 3 a.m. and drive down to Manhattan to shoot sunrise shots. “I’ve always loved the spontaneity of street photography,” he says today.
But before going off and pursuing that love, he spent thirteen years in a decidedly non-spontaneous craft: shooting and producing corporate commercials and documentaries. “I hit it well and made a good living,” says Nate, who along the way got to see a lot of the world and meet captains of industry like Jack Welch and Lou Gerstner. But he was bored and itching to find another line of work. So at the ripe old age of thirty, he joined the local volunteer fire department, which, as it turned out, actually rescued him. In 1995 he took a paid firefighter’s job and is now a fire inspector, and there’s been no looking back. The hours were longer and the pay less than at his corporate job, but being a firefighter “had redeeming social value,” he says. “Making the change gave me a job I loved — one day I delivered a baby and what’s better than that? — a schedule to pursue other things, and time to refocus my photography.”
Given the time and the means to explore the unconventional processes he experimented with in college, Nate jumped at the chance. Large-format photography, he says, “gets you out of your comfort zone and gives you a chance to test yourself. I’ve tried many things, but this is what satisfies me artistically. It’s easy to get into a rut; it’s rare to have a ‘wow’ experience, but the wet-plate process changed my whole approach to the medium. Besides,” he adds, “it looks so cool.”
Wet-plate photography is uniquely successful in capturing 3-D life in two dimensions. But it’s a complicated, finicky, grueling — and toxic — art form. While the artistic process happens along pretty standard photographic lines (find a subject, plan the shot), the technical aspects are unique. The supplies alone are daunting: coils of tin-plated iron that Nate cuts to size; black “Japan” varnish that’s cooked up over a hot plate with a confection of asphaltic minerals, solvents and a variety of “explosive, carcinogenic and extremely poisonous” chemicals; and a silver nitrate bath. This stuff is relegated to the lab (fortunately, Nate says, he spent a lot of time in labs at Yale), but scattered around his basement are a number of large square wooden cameras, most of them older than the artist himself. The labor-intensive process embodies Edison’s famous dictate about genius — it’s 1 percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration.
On the surface, you could say Nate is drawn to a few basic types of subject: nature, old buildings, and construction sites. But that misses the real story. The man is as much philosopher as he is artist and technician. “Technique as an end result alone is trivial, but well-executed technique multiplies the power and beauty of an image,” he says. “The best photograph in my day is the one that punctures through the selective blindness and shows that drama, or beauty, or humor, or sensuality, are all right there in front of us.”
A photograph is the result, typically, of two days of effort. First he’ll find a location. The stone bridges on the Merritt Parkway are a favorite, as are trees, bridges or any building or site that could qualify as a palimpsest: something that, in the process of decay, provides a ghostly image of the past bleeding through into the present. If a realist sees things as they are and an optimist sees them as they could be, Nate Gibbons sees them as they used to be. Construction sites, in his eyes, “have a Stonehenge thing going on.” Old factories and abandoned greenhouses? “These things will disappear,” he says wistfully, and talks passionately of his desire to preserve them through art.
Once he has settled on a subject, he waits for good weather (a sunny day is his ideal lighting). The night before he checks that the chemicals are okay and early the next morning he loads up his truck with a portable darkroom in the back and heads out. On a good day he has two setups and takes six to nine shots. First he lines up the shot with a big camera (his largest stands over two feet square and weighs 18 pounds), then he goes to the truck’s darkroom and sets up the lab and chemical baths. Next he runs a few tests on black glass to get the balance of light and chemistry just right and, when he’s satisfied, he sets the exposure stop and begins to prepare a plate for the exposure in his chem lab.
Back at the truck, Nate slides out a japanned tin, holds it in his left hand and with his right, swiftly pours the collodion emulsion over it and drains the excess, an exacting process. Next, in the dark room, he sets the plate in a silver bath for three minutes, during which time he readies the developing baths and primes the plate holder. Last step: The plate is delicately loaded into the holder and gingerly brought out to the camera. Then he snaps the shot. And yet, as he puts it, “tripping the shutter is sometimes an anticlimax.” The process culminates with him unloading the holder into a developing tray, where it sits for less than half a minute. Cleansing rinses end the development process, and, as the artist describes it, “when the fixer hits the plate, suddenly the cool blue negative flashes away into warm brown tones and exquisite detail. When the planets align — image, chemistry and exposure — I often cry aloud in awe. It is truly magic.”
Yet the planets don’t always align. A hair can fall into a developing plate, dust can blow in from passing automobiles. Or, as happened one warm summer day, the Greenwich police almost blew the sensitive developing process by banging on the truck, convinced some crime was underway. Another time Nate’s work was almost thwarted indefinitely. The day after a large shipment of chemicals arrived, he answered a knock on his door to find a couple of gents from the Drug Enforcement Agency looking dead serious. Still in his firefighter’s outfit, he led the feds down to his lab and showed them some of his work — a convincing story; they moved on.
Not that that would have stopped Nate Gibbons. He still has goals — working in even larger formats, shooting Angkor Wat in Cambodia — and that keeps the work challenging and rewarding. “I’m cognizant that I’m keeping alive a craft that’s worthy,” he says. “And when the mojo’s flowing, you have to go with the flow.”
To find out more, contact the artist’s representative, William L. Schaeffer Photographic Works of Art in Chester, Connecticut (860-526-3870).