It is a great thrill to be able to have Mike Robinson with us at this years Photostock2019. Not only presenting and demonstrating his work, but also teaching a workshop for 6, lucky students. Mike has pretty much reinvented the daguerrotype having completed a very rare PhD on the subject while teaching the process from his home in Toronto to places far and wide. His work has been shown in galleries and museums worldwide and he is considered the preeminent master of the modern daguerrotype process.
Mike Robinson’s PhD dissertation, The Techniques and Material Aesthetics of the Daguerreotype explains why daguerreotypes look the way they do. It does this by retracing the pathway of discovery and innovation described in historical accounts, and combining this historical research with artisanal, tacit, and causal knowledge gained from synthesizing new daguerreotypes in the laboratory. Admired for its astonishing clarity and holographic tones, each daguerreotype contains a unique material story about the process of its creation. Clues from the historical record that report improvements in the art have been tested in practice to explicitly understand the cause for effects described in texts and observed in historic images. This research raises awareness of the materiality of the daguerreotype as an image, and the materiality of the daguerreotype as a process.
Mike has taught courses on 19th century photographic process at Ryerson University in both under graduate and graduate levels in addition to teaching workshops around the world. He earned his PhD in History of Photography from DeMontfort University in Leicester, UK in 2017.
photograph © Mike Robinson