McCarty, Lisa, 2012-2013

Scope and content:

Lisa McCarty's MFA thesis MDCCCXXXIX includes 15 20x24" color LightJet prints made from 4x5" film sheet exposed with handmade camera; 8 11x14" matted color LightJet prints made from 120mm negatives; 6 11x14" matted silver gelatin prints; and 1, handmade box camera.

McCarty provided the following abstract: "MDCCCXXXIX (1839) is a narrative of how photography came about, and how it continues to. In Latent Image: The Discovery of Photography, curator and historian Beaumont Newhall states, "Photography has no single inventor. At the same time, distantly removed from one another, experimenters were working on the same problem unaware of each others work until, in January of 1839, an announcement was made in Paris by the Academie des Sciences of the success of one of them."

Though the 1839 announcement publicly illuminated the discovery of the method to fix images, experiments to this end have been documented as early as 1802 and have never ceased. Consequently, 1839 is both a fixed date and an idea. It signifies the moment photography was born, though this is a moment that repeats with every generation of imagemakers. With the emergence of every new method for fixing images the medium is reborn, persisting much like a phoenix, cyclically regenerating from its own ashes. Therefore, one could say it is the project of every photographer to reinvent the medium whether by technical, formal, and/or conceptual means.

MDCCCXXXIX is an account of one such project. My particular experiments have involved pilgrimages to document sites where Fox Talbot, Daguerre, and Niépce worked, reading and generating facsimiles of their instructions for building cameras and fixing images, and finally the creation and systematic testing of my own cameras. Through this process I have discovered photography yet again, and have the pleasure of rediscovering it each and every time I make an image.

And so, still distantly removed from one another across geographic and temporal expanses, the cycle endures. Experimenters are still working on the same problem and MDCCCXXXIX continues to unfold."

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