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On View in Milwaukee

Eric Baillies

Temporal Bridge / Shadows of Milwaukee

Past Exhibition

June 5–September 14

MOWA on the Lake 

About the Exhibition

This exhibition is open to the public at MOWA on the Lake, located inside the retirement campus of Saint John’s On The Lake in downtown Milwaukee. Learn more

Using alternative photographic processes from the nineteenth-century learned from experts at the George Eastman Museum in Rochester, New York, Eric Baillies is drawn to the sometimes tedious but always magical world of the darkroom. Carting around a large format wooden camera, he painstakingly considers composition, lighting, and other conditions; each negative he creates is handmade and keenly susceptible to processing mishaps or handling errors. Once the capture is made, Baillies uses a number of different processes including tintype, salt, collodion, and cyanotype to create one-of-a-kind photographs that speak of days gone by.

For this series of work, Baillies photographed around Milwaukee capturing “how a place reflects back into its community intentional acts of design, emotion, and architecture.” The resulting works, include cyanotypes (a process routinely used by engineers to create blueprints), salt prints (one of the oldest photographic processes first invented by William Henry Fox Talbot in the 1830s), and collodion chloride prints (paper coated with egg white containing light-sensitive silver chloride exposed to light). In a today’s world where every moment is captured by the simple push of a button, Baillies work stands as a testament to the physical object—a rare sight considering that most images made today will only exist in digital format.