Ben Cauchi’s Photographs Turn Everyday Objects into Occult Metaphors

Ben Cauchi’s eerie, technically impressive images are quizzical objects created to exploit the nostalgia of bygone eras. Rather than using still photography as a documentary tool or an illustration of the truth, Cauchi carefully stages his photographs and mines historical techniques. In “Echo Chamber,” he’s assembled a series of ambrotypes—an obscure mid-19th-century wet-plate photograph process—that reveal the fluid, mystical nature of the everyday, a kind of alchemy the artist has become notorious for.

In the era of Photoshop and high-definition smartphone cameras, some artists have turned to older, more time-intensive techniques. The Berlin-based Cauchi, who has used wet-plate processes almost exclusively since 2002, has taken the practice to extremes, mastering a number of early emulsion techniques including tintype (photographs made on thin sheets of metal) and cyanotype (which produce cyan-blue negative images). In 2010, he commissioned the construction of a bellows camera, used to capture negatives on a chemically treated glass plate so large it produces images that measure 20-by-24 inches.