LECTURES

France Scully Osterman will discuss her first collaboration with her husband, Mark Osterman, The Light at Lacock: Sun Sketches at the Twilight of Photography, currently on display at the PRC in The Doors of Perception. The couple created a collection of paper negatives using William Henry Fox Talbot’s original process of photogenic drawing and his earliest camera designs. They trod the same ground as the inventor in the village of Lacock, England, and revisited the miracle of the first chemical sketches made by nature alone. Along the way the couple made some discoveries of their own. Limitations of the early process and an inclement climate eventually guided the Ostermans to concentrate on photographing the effect of light that surrounds a subject rather than that which illuminates it. The results are painterly but also fugitive. As in Talbot’s time, the same light that created these images also destroys them. And so, it is only by the ironic marriage with the digital pigment print that now displaces photography that these colorful sun sketches can be exhibited for the first time.