About This Image

Written by Amy Goldman and photographed by Jerry Spagnoli. Signed by the photographer. Published by Bloomsbury; 2015. ISBN-13: 978-1620407776.On two hundred acres in the Hudson Valley, Amy Goldman grows heirloom fruits and vegetables. The president of the New York Botanical Garden has called her "perhaps the world's premier vegetable gardener." For over 15 years Jerry Spagnoli has visited Amy's gardens to preserve these cherished varieties with the daguerreotype process documenting her work researching and growing non-hybrid agricultural produce.The Washington Post's Adrian Higgins says Spagnoli "produces some of the most arresting black-and-white images imaginable. The subjects have a volume and a polish to them but are also bathed in shadow. This chiaroscuro lends them a quality that is both ghostly and tangible."He also describes Spagnoli's laborious process, "[he] takes a 6 1/2-inch-by-4 1/2-inch copper plate coated in silver and polishes the surface to a high gloss. The plate is sensitized with the vapors of iodine and then bromine in an enclosed box, transferred to the camera, exposed, returned to the vapor chamber to be cleaned of the light-sensitive salts, toned with gold chloride, and then sealed behind glass to protect the image and prevent the silver from tarnishing. There is no negative or paper print." With this series, because some specimens didn't hold up to the 3 hour exposure, he set up a large-format view camera on the farm. The film negative was converted to a positive, which was then turned into a daguerreotype in his NYC studio. Later in the project after the film company closed, Spagnoli used a digital camera as the image source.

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