The USU Eastern Gallery East is excited to host an exhibit entitle Where You Come From is Gone which is photographs from a 100-year-old field camera that Jared Ragland and Cary Norton took as they traveled over 3,000 miles across 30 counties in Alabama and Florida to locate, visit, and photograph Indigenous settlements.  Gallery East Director, Noel Carmack stopped by Castle Country Radio to discuss the details of the exhibit.

“The purpose of the exhibit was to convey the importance of place, the passage of time, and the political dimensions of remembrance through the historical wet plate collodion photographic process,” said Carmack. “It’s an early form of photography, its uses one of those old cameras, those box cameras that you would see where someone would use a black cloak or fabric to cover their heads, and then they would use a flash, and then there was a glass that would slide in the back of the box, and they would take a photograph using this old method.”

The photos that were captured are very melancholy landscapes and will be displayed in a large format so that you can see the detail in each of the photographs. “So the format of the glass plate negative is not quite this large but they’ve enlarged the prints, and they manipulated the values in those images but they’re monumental in size, they’re 40”x50”,” stated Carmack. The duo also had to incorporate on their trip a make shift portable dark room in the vehicle of Jared Ragland.

The exhibit will be on display at USU Eastern’s Gallery East from March 7 through April 1. Gallery East is located in the Central Instruction Building and its exhibits are free and open to the public during the academic year from 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m., and closed weekends and holidays. The gallery observes COVID-19 precautions, including face coverings and a limit of 10 people in the gallery at one time.