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- "Young Woman With Aura, From Ambrotype"
The very title "Ghosts: Civil War Portraits" sounds haunting. And in a visual sense, William Betcher's photographs, on display at Catamount Arts in St. Johnsbury, are just that. They resuscitate the images of 19th-century men and women using 21st-century technology.
As Betcher explained in a phone interview, he has a long-standing interest in both the Civil War and the photography of the era. Moved by "the poignancy of these young people going off to war," he also admires the quality of the surviving portraits — in daguerreotypes, ambrotypes and tintypes — and their presentation in decorative memorial cases. The photographs were considered precious objects at the time; many people had only one. It's a sensibility lost in the digital age, when we view and share images on screens rather than hold them in our hands, Betcher noted.
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- "Federal, Hand on Chest, From Ambrotype"
He typically sources 1860s photos in antique stores and on eBay. Separating a photographic plate from its metal matte reveals a "vivid patina of 160 years of oxidation," as Betcher puts it on his website. He reverses the image so that this pattern is visible, forming a sort of aura around the figure. Then Betcher enlarges the minuscule original, turns it into a transparency and mounts it on 24-by-30-inch acrylic.
"It struck me as a way to reproduce [the photographs], using modern technology to echo things that were done back then," he said. "Also, once I had them as transparencies, they kind of looked like ghosts."
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- "Young Federal, Armed, Violet Haze"
Betcher enhances this quality by attaching standoff clamps to each corner of a finished work, allowing it to hang slightly more than an inch away from the wall. In the gallery, light passes through the image and casts a spirit-like shadow behind it.
"Ghosts" is not Betcher's first foray into war-related photography. About 10 years ago, he said, he saw a feature in the Washington Post called "Faces of the Fallen," which documents American military casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan. "It put me in mind of these pictures of Civil War soldiers — 160 years later, so similar," he said. "It heightened the sensation that I wanted to do something on this."
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- "Blue Woman, From Ruby Ambrotype"
For two previous series, Betcher shot digital macro images of broken World War I-era toy soldiers and more contemporary action figures — think G.I. Joe — "to portray the emotions and damage of war," as he writes on his website.
Asked if anything in the faces of the strangers in those 19th-century portraits stirred emotions of his own, Betcher noted that the men tended to put on their "game face" and rarely showed vulnerability. "There was a certain impenetrability to them," he said.
That was one reason he chose also to include images of women. They suffered and died during the war, too, Betcher pointed out. "They weren't soldiers but were very much a part of the story, and there's a broader range of emotions."
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- "Child With Doll, From Ruby Ambrotype"
Betcher has more than a passing interest in mental states: He's been a practicing psychiatrist "a zillion years," he joked. Actually, since the mid-1980s — and he worked as a clinical psychologist for some years before that. Now he works "less than half time" at his office in Needham, Mass.
He's also the photo editor for Solstice, a literary magazine, and a writer with several books to his credit. (He earned an MFA in writing at Vermont College of Fine Arts in 1997.) Betcher's most recent volume has nothing to do with war. Anthem for a Warm Little Pond features fine-art nature photography around a body of water in southern Maine.
"Ghosts: Civil War Portraits" is on view through June 4, with a reception on Saturday, April 15, at 4 p.m. Learn more at williambetcherphotography.com.