Colby Caldwell Uses the Negatives to Develop
Quinn Bonney | April 7, 2022
Special to The Echo | Colby Caldwell
Visiting photography professor at Warren Wilson College (WWC), Colby Caldwell is known both nationally and internationally for his non-contemporary art style. Caldwell has a unique and abstract approach that deconstructs every current element of photography.
Caldwell’s work has been shown in installations throughout the world, including Madrid, Lithuania, the Smithsonian and Basel, Switzerland. His most recent showing was at Radford University in Virginia, where he is the inaugural artist in residence.
He visited Moscow in 1996 and met with Yevgeny Khaldei, who took the famous photograph of the Soviet flag being raised over the Reichstag in World War II. Caldwell attended Appalachian State University (ASU) between 1983 and 1986, where he studied European history and more specifically, World War II. With his interest in Soviet World War II photography, he was invited to travel with a group of western photojournalists to Russia. There he worked with InterFoto, Lucian Perkins from the Washington Post and photographer William Klein on a project to ensure up-and-coming Russian photographers weren’t being taken advantage of by western photography and history enthusiasts.
“All these people from the West were going to go there, and they were basically … pillaging all these creative people because they were offering like, ‘I'll give you $100 for your 20 years of negatives,’” Caldwell said.
He explained that Interfoto was “... working with the established and up and coming photographers to make sure that they understood the value of their work, what their rights were and that they didn't get exploited by all these people … out there and trying to take their things (photographs and negatives).”
After studying European history at ASU, in 1989 Caldwell attended the Corcoran School of the Arts in Washington D.C., where he received a Bachelor’s of Fine Arts in photography. He went on later to teach photography and arts there as well as at St. Mary’s College in Maryland. There he established himself as an artist that saw the world in a unique way.
“Colby brings the viewer a different way of seeing the world, from small things you would normally overlook, to the people in his life, to the world around us all,” stated Mars Hill University in their 2019 piece on Caldwell.
While Caldwell is known for his photography work, his methods of image capturing are atypical. In college, he was taught wet-darkroom photography where he became accustomed to the process-oriented methods of photography.
After he graduated in 1990, the digital era of photography began. This left Caldwell in a hybrid state, given that technology changed so quickly, and he was never trained on computers or digital cameras.
“I was completely wet-darkroom oriented, completely black-and-white oriented,” Caldwell said. “It's like very process-oriented. … It's a very kind of physical way of working because you've got the darkroom, the natural photographing and development of film, the actual darkroom work, and all of that is very process-oriented, but it's also very physical. Whereas with the digital, sometimes it's just super static. You're kind of just in front of the computer.”
For Caldwell, photography has been a slow-developing craft with most aspects of it staying static throughout his life. However, after the recent advances in digital technology, he began to rethink what photography could mean.
“People were like, ‘what is photography?’” Caldwell said. “We knew what it was in 1989. It was black-and-white film or even color film, and enlargers, and lights and cameras, and you know, all that's what photography was, but now it became just ones and zeros.”
Caldwell embraced the new age of digital media and photography, though didn’t want to lose the process-oriented and physical aspects of photography.
“I was curious about how I could separate my media, my information from just being ones and zeros, and finding ways to kind of interfere or create a juncture where the ones and zeros took on a more physical attribute,” Caldwell said.
The process of taking photos was just as important to Caldwell as the actual images themselves. He began to find more metaphorical and literal connections between wet-darkroom photography and digital photography.
His solution was to stray from point-and-click digital cameras and make his image-capturing process more involved. He did this by using a scanner rather than a camera, with 10-minute scans for each image.
Caldwell would put the scanner down on something he would want to capture for a few minutes then move it to something else mid-scan.
“I'd pick the scanner back up and start moving it to different parts and become very active, almost performative with the scanner, in a way that really got me physically back into the physicality of photography,” Caldwell said.
Caldwell said the scanner facilitated his reconnection with wet darkroom photography.
“You don’t see what you’re getting. It's hidden because it's what's underneath you’re recording, this is not a recording like when you're photographing with the camera … At least, especially with wet darkroom, you couldn't see what you're getting cause it was on this canister of film that you had to go develop.”
Caldwell's unique views on art and the creative method don’t only encapsulate his own work. After four years of working at WWC in a variety of areas, mostly senior projects, this is Caldwell’s first year in the photography department.
In his time filling the position of previous photography professor Eric Baden, Caldwell has become aware of the facilities WWC bestows its students. It is no secret that at a small liberal arts college like WWC, art resources are limited.
“I was not as completely aware of the facilities here,” Colby said. “What I've realized is that in some ways, that (the limits of the facilities) is a positive for the community that operates within the Warren Wilson ecosystem because the limits that the facilities offer actually provide unparalleled experimentation.”
Caldwell explained that not having all possible resources available encourages intuition and creativity among developing artists. This is how he developed his scanner-photography method, given that there was no resource for the imaging capturing he desired, so he invented his own unique process.
Caldwell is a big believer in the do-it-yourself aesthetic.
“If you don't have access to state-of-the-art facilities, if you're still fascinated by it, (and) if you're still interested in the creative process, you're going to figure out a way to make it happen no matter what,” he said.
“That kind of curiosity and kind of having to maybe do a little bit of research, a little bit of r(esearch) and d(evelopment), and then a little bit of, you know, duct tape … and kind of figure out a way to kind of approximate what you don't have into something that actually you now have and now it's actually something that you created.”
Caldwell said that it’s a big plus in a place like WWC, with a small community and a variety of students to experiment and improvise.
“What you do have here is like the creative hub of people and professors, and really interesting faculty and the ability to kind of make it up as you go,” Caldwell said. “... (The opportunity) to learn skills that are going to keep you to be able to work beyond Warren Wilson, work beyond the facilities that you now don't have access to anymore.
“So if you had to kind of create your own facilities within the facilities here, you'll know that once you graduate (you) can do it again. And I think that's big.”
Being an improvised artist himself, Caldwell strives to continue the ethos that Baden set up of always being curious. Although there are limitations to the resources that WWC can offer, Caldwell considered the community at the school to be its greatest asset.
“It's not a cookie-cutter program that you're going to get,” Caldwell said. “It took me a while to get to that. I was a little frustrated when I first was here because I was so frustrated that I wouldn't be able to teach — teach it the way that I knew how to teach it. But then I realized what I had to do is that actually I need to do what I'm asking the students to do. I gotta work within us … but don't doubt it because your best resources are probably the person walking down the path that you just passed. There are amazing people here, so that's why I would say that's wonderful.