Left: Roger de Montebello with his CrystalChrome 3D Camera, 1984
Right: M. Henry Jones with his stroboscopic wheel (late 1970s), 2016.
The rise of digital photography in the 21st century has provided a new perspective on the creative struggles of artists and photographers during the pre-digital era. This Gallery 98 newsletter spotlights two artists, M. Henry Jones (1957 – 2022) and Roger Lannes de Montebello (1908 – 1986), caught on the far side of this digital divide. In the case of both artists, their creative ambitions exceeded the capabilities of the analog technology that was available to them in the 1970s and 80s. Both however persisted, ultimately inventing new ways of working and creating intriguing hybrid works that command our attention as much for the way they forefront process and methods alongside other goals.
You can visit online exhibitions by both Jones and de Montebello in Gallery 98’s special collection section. The two short videos below provide an introduction to their work. Both videos are by Cole Berry-Miller.
Roger Lannes de Montebello: A 40-Year Quest for 3-D Photography
Roger de Montebello spent 40-years striving to create 3-D photographs which allowed viewers to see the subject from different angles as they walked past the picture. To achieve this, de Montebello developed a new type of camera that produced individual transparencies each consisting of 2,644 separate exposures. When such a transparency is seen through a “lens-viewing screen,” the multiple exposures merge into a single 3-D image that changes depending on the viewer’s position. Today technology has provided more effective paths for the creation of 3-D images, and de Montebello’s work has become primarily a relic of a remote analog era.
Visit Gallery 98’s online exhibition Roger Lannes de Montebello: A 40-Year Quest for 3-D Photography
M. Henry Jones: Creating A Strobe Effect Before Photoshop
M. Henry Jones’ 2.5-minute film of a performance by the rock group Fleshtones that uses stroboscopic effects took nearly two years to complete. In order to realize his vision, Jones needed 1700 individually printed photographs, each hand-cut with an X-ACTO knife and hand-colored. The photos were then reshot frame-by-frame with changing color backgrounds. Jones made Soul City in 1978-79, today with the help of digitization and tools like Photoshop, this type of film would be a much simpler task.
Visit the Gallery 98 online exhibition M. Henry Jones’ Film Soul City, 1977-79
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