Because his dad was part owner of a one-hour photo lab, Ben Nixon grew up immersed in film: the methods and the magic.
“I realized that I was going to become a photographer when I made my first real self-portrait,” recalls the artist. The color snapshot shows Nixon as a youngster, sitting in a rather elegant dining room. Before him is a formal place setting and a wine goblet filled with milk. He’s alone at the head of the table, wearing a neatly ironed dress shirt. His posture is straight and he’s looking directly into the camera while he uses a fork to partake of Vienna sausages eaten right out of the can.
Asked to comment on the image, Nixon jokingly offers professional “advice”: “I would highly recommend a glass of milk with a side of Vienna sausage to anyone trying to find their way in life.”
He’s moved on since then, and today his photos can be found in permanent collections including the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, the Boston Public Library, and Asheville Art Museum. Born and raised in Spartanburg, SC, Nixon spent nearly 12 years working in the Bay Area of California with many renowned photographers. But now he’s ready to be closer to home.
“The South never interested me as subject matter until recently,” admits Nixon. “But now that I’m a bit older, things have changed. I felt it was time to put some roots down in the mountains, so I moved to Asheville in 2013.”
For the past seven years Nixon has specifically focused on going back to the future — creating his photographs with a 19th-century photographic process known as “wet plate collodion.” Instead of developing the image onto a piece of conventional film or treated paper, Nixon makes his negatives by pouring a chemical emulsion onto a plate of clear glass and then bathing it in silver nitrate.
“I think the explosion of digital imagery really forced me to look backward in the history of photography,” Nixon explains. “I have always really admired the American landscape masters like Timothy O’Sullivan and Carleton Watkins. The prints made from the glass-plate negatives have a certain luminous quality to them that I wanted in my own work. I can achieve unique effects in both the making of the glass negative as well as the printing of the negative.”
Nixon is a masterful photographic technician, but he sets aside academic ideas of what constitutes a perfect print, preferring to show his hand as an artist. Part of that organic approach is to work outdoors, in the natural environment.
“Working out in the elements removes the aspect of control. To a certain extent, I cannot control all of the marks from the wet-plate process,” Nixon acknowledges. “Sometimes they work, sometimes they don’t.” But more often than not, the creative risks Nixon takes by relinquishing a modicum of control are what allow him to capture extraordinary beauty. The serendipitous visual irregularities create an alluring, esoteric quality that is his artistic signature.
The antique process is rather unwieldy, though, because negatives he uses have to be prepared, exposed, and developed on-site, before the materials dry and make it impossible to develop the pictures. Nixon’s methods are similar to the way ancient fresco artists painted murals (think the Sistine Chapel) — that is, hurriedly, before the wet, stucco-like surface dried.
Nixon says he prefers older technologies so that he can “slow down and respond to the subject” in from of him. Ironically, slowing down requires that he speed up the process. “Most landscape photographers wait for that decisive moment to click the shutter,” he says, “but I don’t have that luxury. There is a window of only about 10 minutes from the time I set up my camera and when I can make the exposure. The light is never the same from one minute to the next, so I rely heavily on subject, form, and composition.”
With no time to drive to a traditional darkroom, Nixon had to come up with an alternative solution. “I converted a wardrobe box into a portable darkroom that fits into the back of my Subaru,” he reveals. “Or I can put it into a garden cart to gain further access away from the car.”
Ben Nixon is represented by Haen Gallery in Asheville and in Brevard. See bennixonphotography.com or thehaengallery.com for more information.