This article first appeared in the St. Louis Beacon, July 6, 2011 - John Foster is frequently called upon to spread out his virtual black velvet jewelers' cloth, all the better to inspect the diamonds in the rough that sometimes come his way.
John and his wife, Teenuh, as it happens, are magnets for such jewels, and are known nationally as collectors and enthusiasts of photography, self-taught art and found objects that, to them, defy traditional classifications.
Their passion for the art of the accidental - the peculiar photograph, the work of art produced by outsider artists, manifestations of the unconscious, the action of natural decay on an image or object -- is profound and highly developed.
Here's a description of them from their website:
"John and Teenuh Foster share a passionate interest in collecting works of art by self-taught artists, as well as anonymous objects that to them, share attributes of great design and mystery. They consider vernacular photography to be a long overlooked genre of folk art, capturing elements of history, sociology, psychology and often accidental moments on film."
Recently they were beneficiaries of an unexpected gift that takes vernacular discoveries to new heights. An encounter at the Intuit Gallery in Chicago resulted in the Fosters becoming custodians of two cardboard boxes filled with glass plate negatives that date from around 1900. Lynne Bailey of Chicago, who bought them at a flea market in 1975, owned the plates. The 100 or so negatives lay in the boxes until recently, when the Fosters acquired them, looked at them and were filled with wonder.
Glass plate negatives came into nearly universal use soon after the invention of photography in the mid 1800s until 1900 or so. The emulsifying process is called collodion. Here is an edited explanation of it from the Encyclopedia Britannica's online edition:
"The wet-collodion process is an early photographic technique invented by the Englishman Frederick Scott Asher in 1851. The process involved adding a soluble iodide to a solution of collodion (cellulose nitrate) and coating a glass plate with the mixture. In the darkroom the plate was immersed in a solution of silver nitrate to form silver iodide.
"The plate, still wet, was exposed in the camera. It was then developed by pouring a solution of pyrogallic acid over it and was fixed with a strong solution of sodium thiosulfate, for which potassium cyanide was later substituted."
The process, which in the age of the iPhone image sounds so incredibly complicated and arcane, produces rich, silvery, exquisite images of enormous depth and character.
All this is aesthetically interesting, of course, and informs us of one aspect of these negatives, and that is their extraordinary fragility. They demand careful maintenance, and it is not difficult to imagine, regretfully, that thousands of them either decayed or bit the dust because of carelessness or the natural course of time. This delicate aspect of them is evident, of course, but what appeals to the Fosters and to me is content, what is portrayed by the realized image and how, in the frame, the content is presented. There is mystery involved too, and maybe it is a good idea to start with that.
First of all, we have no idea who the photographer might be. Second, while we know absolutely that many of the photographs are of places in St. Louis, other image locations are unfamiliar.
Those that we know for certain are St. Louis-focused are marvelous. There is, for example, a panorama made up of three negatives of the plowing up of ground for the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition. Brookings Hall, the front door to Washington University, is shown in the far distance.
There is a photograph taken at the corner of 19th and Locust streets downtown, looking west, revealing buildings that exist today. The St. Louis Museum of Fine Arts, razed many years ago, was also at 19th and Locust, and it is featured in all its Victorian majesty. This building and its collection were the property of Washington University. The City Art Museum, which was renamed the St. Louis Art Museum, came later. Other photographs show the riverfront with the mighty Eads Bridge traversing the Mississippi, and riverboats going about their tasks of loading and unloading passengers and supplies. And we find also Tower Grove Park and the Missouri Botanical Garden, its identity revealed by those telltale lily pads, big and strong enough for a grownup to stand upon.
Those are among the easy ones. As John Foster and I looked at others last week, we were tantalized by places that looked vaguely familiar, but whose precise identification eluded us.
The photographer clearly was no mere shutterbug but was someone interested deeply in giving as accurate as possible a depiction of his world, and exciting moments in the time in which he or she lived.
Some are purely straightforward documents of a moment; others look into the eyes of people long dead or into the sunshine and shadow of a landscape, and transcend the moment, and speak of conditions that are timeless -- sorrow and joy, hope and regret, darkness and light.
We are fortunate this photographic treasure trove fell into the hands of the Fosters, and fortunate too that John Foster works in a creatively nourishing environment such as TOKY Branding and Design, the Beacon's down-the-road neighbor in the Locust District.
When I went to see the plates the other day, it was clear to me that the images had captivated the staff.
"We all have jobs to do," Foster said, "but you can't help but embrace stuff like this." That predilection goes all the way to the top. Foster said Eric Thoelke, president and creative director of TOKY, loves the pictures, and encourages his employees' interests in investigations such as the resurrection of these images.
Someday, prints made directly from the negatives, either in contact prints or enlargements, may be created, but that is a costly, time-consuming process. In the mean time, Geoff Story, a TOKY colleague of John Foster, has photographed the plates. This produces a high-resolution negative image that can be technologically flipped, revealing the picture in all its glory. In some cases, a state of decay is revealed, which, ironically, has a special melancholy beauty all its own.
Foster is exuberant and eloquent in discussing his treasure. "They take us places that we have never seen before," he said. "We are the first people in 110 years or so to look at them."