Luther Gerlach’s images grace the permanent collections of The J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles and the National Portrait Gallery in London, among other institutions. While researching his work, it’s almost impossible not to stumble across Gerlach’s father, also named Luther.
The elder Gerlach, who passed away last year at the age of 94, had a Ph.D. in cultural anthropology, taught at the University of Minnesota, and coauthored several academic books. In an article celebrating Gerlach’s life on the university’s website, a few of the images highlight his affinity for photography. In the lead photograph, Gerlach’s father wears a camera around his neck, his finger on the shutter. In another, he holds a camera to his face. “He illustrated all of his classes with photography before it was fashionable,” says his son, who was born in Blaine, Minnesota, in 1960. “My father was, without a doubt, my inspiration.”
A “FANTASTICAL” CHILDHOOD
Gerlach’s father traveled the world to document the civil rights and environmental movements, often taking his family with him. Before long, a camera hung from the young Gerlach’s neck, too—a plastic Diana camera that used medium-format film. The camera often didn’t even have film in it, but Gerlach didn’t mind. “The camera put a frame to the world,” he said.
Traveling with his father also introduced Gerlach to creatives of all kinds, from child artisans in Haiti and Colombia to the oceanographer and filmmaker, Jacques Cousteau. “I grew up in this kind of fantastical childhood doing these kinds of things and then I’d go back to this tiny rural area where my teachers would ask, ‘What did you do this summer?’ Well, Jacques Cousteau taught me to scuba dive.” At times, no one believed him, but Gerlach had photographic proof.
Gerlach has dyslexia, and in middle school, it began to affect his studies. In lieu of writing book reports and papers, he asked his teachers if he could make a movie or create a film strip. At the University of Minnesota, where Gerlach studied biology, his frustration with writing reached a tipping point. The fact that his father was an accomplished author made things worse. Gerlach left the university and enrolled in art school. “Art has never been something that slowed me down, versus the written word, which has always slowed me down,” Gerlach says.
GOING WEST
In art school, while shooting photos at a local dance studio, Gerlach met a ballerina. They hadn’t been dating long when she told him she was moving to Santa Barbara, California. She asked if he wanted to join her. Gerlach figured, Why not? In art school, he had studied the photography of Ansel Adams, Brett Weston, and others who captured the areas around Big Sur and Carmel, California. Weston was Gerlach’s idol. “I felt like it was one of those things that just comes along at exactly the right time,” Gerlach explains. “I said, ‘Sure, I’ll move to California.’ You know, the artist thing.”
Not long after he arrived in Santa Barbara, Gerlach saw an ad in an art magazine for a workshop in Hawaii with Brett Weston and his brother Cole. Gerlach saved his money and went. Cole Weston taught the workshop, but Gerlach wanted to meet Brett. One rainy day, while Gerlach was staring out a window watching rain drip off a piece of grass, Brett Weston walked into the room. “He came over to me and told me that this was his favorite place to sit in the house,” says Gerlach. “We became friends.”
Gerlach began to work with Weston, describing him as “not really a teacher—simply by looking and watching, you learned to see how the film does. To see the negative.” At the time, Gerlach was fond of making large contact prints, where the size of the film matched the size of the print. Weston preferred the more common silver gelatin printing process.
After apprenticing with Weston for two years, Gerlach took what he learned and traveled across the United States selling his prints at art fairs. It was the late 1980s, and Gerlach traveled roughly 75,000 to 100,000 miles a year, taking photos along the way and turning hotel rooms into makeshift darkrooms. He was making $100,000 a year doing what he loved. But the emergence of digital photography changed everything. Photographers began to use Photoshop to create the hand-brushed quality of Gerlach’s photographs and, he says, told customers they were using the same process Gerlach was using. “I would hear them talking—complete lies,” he says.
PIVOTING TO WET PLATE
Rather than dive into digital, Gerlach moved into a photographic process that was even more singular: the wet collodion process, invented by Frederick Scott Archer in 1851. The process involves coating a plate of glass or metal with a collodion chemical emulsion, followed by using a silver nitrate bath to make the plate light sensitive. The plate is then placed in a light tight film holder, with the photo made almost immediately so that the plate can be developed while it’s still wet. This aspect of the process often necessitates the need for a portable darkroom.
Gerlach sought out wet plate collodion workshops and found one in Montana offered by Mark Osterman, the former photographic process historian at George Eastman Museum in Rochester, New York. Not only were Osterman and his wife, France Scully Osterman, recognized as experts in early photographic processes, they lived near Gerlach’s brother in Montana. “Serendipity,” says Gerlach.
Using the wet collodion process made Gerlach feel “present as an artist,” he says. “I saw the final product right there in front of me—minutes from when I photographed it. The same leaves that are on the tree that I’m standing in front of are on the image.” Gerlach likened the effect to the difference between listening to recorded music versus performing music live. “I love the aspect of the DNA of the place I photographed—things like dust—actually being in the image,” Gerlach explains. “The process allowed me to feel more like a photographer versus a machine that printed prints to sell so I could make money.”
Gerlach’s wet plate collodion photography kit includes a 200-pound wooden view camera, lenses, film holders, chemicals, and a cart to move it all. When he first started, finding wet plate chemicals wasn’t easy. Today, outfits like Bostic & Sullivan sell the chemical kits, but Gerlach has always considered “constant problem solving” to be part of the creative process.
“I look at it as a positive thing because it’s putting walls and constraints on things to force me to see it in a different way. Not everything is possible. So, I have to filter out absolutely everything that doesn’t work to make it work,” Gerlach explains. “Photography is nothing but compromises. Everything has an opposite to it. ... But when the final product works, nothing else compares to it.”
Writer and photographer Allison Shirreffs works with various organizations and publications.
Tags: fine art photography
