MITAN — Éric Antoine

"What am I doing with time? If there were only one question left for humankind—the one shared by all humanity—it would be this. Time is our common good, the only one we risk losing if we do nothing with it. Today, in the long labor of time that is Éric Antoine’s photographic journey, he offers us a word, a beautiful word: MITAN. It tells us where he stands: halfway. It also tells us where he is: in the middle. Few words speak at once of both space and time. This one does. In it, Éric Antoine’s entire body of work is distilled.”
— Pierre Wat

About MITAN

For the past fifteen years, Éric Antoine has devoted his work primarily to experimentation with early and hybrid photographic processes, most notably the wet collodion technique. These images, of rare delicacy, produced on glass through a demanding and fragile process, stand in quiet resistance to the contemporary digital deluge and assert a profoundly tangible approach to photography.

Recurring themes run through his exhibitions: the passage of time, and an artistic as well as existential quest for simplicity. He works obsessively, in series, beginning with still lifes in which everyday objects are elevated to the status of precious artifacts. The circle, among other symbols, has gradually imposed itself within his work.

The light of his forests appears in images repeated across the seasons. Rather than pursuing ever-changing distant landscapes, he returns to the same places, bearing witness to their transformation and, with it, to time itself. “I do not change my subject; it is my subject that changes.”

In his series Cerveaux, layers of leaves and stacked documents evoke known or imagined lives. More recently, the series La Forme stages the sphere that recurs throughout his work. Once discreet and dark, it later appeared in Useful Lies as a white sphere, embodying optimism and hope. In La Forme, this circular image is all that remains of an approach in which the subject, the model, has disappeared, leaving only the essence of photography: light and optics.

The question of the image’s materiality remains central to the artist’s research. Far from any nostalgia, the wet collodion process becomes here an emancipatory discipline. In an almost sculptural approach, he creates true photographic objects, shimmering with silvery reflections.

About Éric Antoine

Éric Antoine was born in 1974. As he emerged from adolescence, he discovered his passion for photography and devoted all his energy to exploring the possibilities of analog processes. He set out into the world, encountering people and urban landscapes through his many travels. Fifteen years and thousands of magazine pages later, his life took a sudden turn. In 2010, he chose the quiet of a country house, far from the turmoil of the cities. He slowed his pace considerably and began to focus on life and nature in their simplest forms.

About Ambrotypes and History

by David M. Roth, editor, publisher, and founder of Squarecylinder.

Extracted from Dolby Chadwick Gallery website. (Éric Antoine is represented by this gallery in the USA).

In the early 1970s, a small cohort of artists began seeking out 19th-century methods to restore to photography the sense of alchemical magic it once had. Photo historian Lyle Rexer put a name to this activity.  He called it the antiquarian avant-garde, a contradictory term that brilliantly summarized what, in the wake of digital imaging’s depredations, has since become a full-fledged movement. What began as a trickle (Adam Fuss, Jerry Spagnoloi, Gabor Kerekes, Laurent Millet) now feels like a torrent.  Locally, its adherents include Binh Dahn (daguerreotypes), Chris McCaw (heliotypes), Meghann Riepenhoff (camera-less cyanotypes), Ben Nixon and Stephen Berkman (collodion) and Robert Buelteman (electricity-generated photograms) to name just a few. 

French photographer Éric Antoine joins their ranks using ambrotype. This laborious 19th-century process typically involves coating a glass plate with a syrupy substance (collodion), bathing it in a ferrous sulfide solution to make it light-sensitive, loading the plate into the camera for exposure and then developing it. The entire procedure must be executed within minutes before the collodion dries. The resulting positive images can be seen on glass plates. Some are carefully assembled in the studio, others made in situ outdoors. 

The book: A Hardcover Edition

MITAN is part of a cycle of five books, conceived as a gradual progression from a black cover (Ensemble Seul, 2015) to a white cover (anticipated in 2035, if all goes well). This third volume features a grey cloth-bound cover, revealed here for the first time on the occasion of this campaign.

All the images in the book are drawn from ambrotypes, produced with a large-format camera in sizes ranging from 24 × 30 cm to 40 × 40 cm. The publication has been crafted with particular care to faithfully render the subtle tonalities of these unique pieces, thanks to the technical developments carried out by the Printmodel studio.

Book specifications
30 × 24.5 cm, landscape format
180 pages printed in 2 colors + selected varnish
75 photographs
(reproductions of ambrotypes)
1 section of 8 pages in 5 colors + selected varnish

Illustration of heliogravure, get the print based on a copperplate (not included) with the Reward MITAN HELIOGRAVURE EDITION / Illustration d'une héliogravure, obtenez le tirage basée sur la plaque de cuivre dans la contrepartie MITAN HELIOGRAVURE EDITION

MITAN 25x25cm Piezography Edition / Olivier XLIII

Mitan 40x40cm Piezography Edition / Useful Lies XIV

Cerveau XLVII was presented as an 40x40cm ambrotype, unique piece