I think WangвЂ™s students may add to that description a mention of WangвЂ™s quiet yet inflexible stubbornness, a quality that is of utmost necessity in a forty-year teaching and art-making career. Vestal talks of SamвЂ™s sensitive and flexible eye and mind that matches the sensitivity of his images and models. A beautifully executed introduction by David Vestal completes the writing within the bookвЂ™s covers. Even though Wang is Chinese-born, he immigrated to the States when he was 20 and has lived here since, mostly in South Carolina. There are two essays in Chinese by those who have come to know Wang in the last decade. In fact, it is his former students-of whom this reviewer is one-who speak his testimony. Over half the images are traditional gelatin silver film which ironically is fast becoming yet another alternative process, and the rest infrared, zone plate, pinhole, altered lens, Polaroid, casein, silkscreen, gum bichromate, color copier, cyanotype, and combinations thereof.ДЄs can be deduced from WangвЂ™s book, with only a mere 10 paragraphs and three categories used to explain four decades of work, he is a man of few words carefully chosen. Process is secondary in this monograph, but to this readerвЂ™s delight, there is a thumbnail Index of Images in the back of the book that indicates the processes used. WangвЂ™s work is testimony to a man who has never subsumed imagery to process. WeвЂ™ve all seen technically astonishing yet predictable photographs. The trap that can occur with a love of process is that the technical discovery becomes the passion and the imagery less so. During this time period, Sam Wang discovered these antique processes and set about incorporating them into his art. It wasnвЂ™t until the counterculture generation in the 1960s and 1970s with its вЂњanything goesвЂќ attitude that a renaissance occurred. Processes such as daguerreotype, carbon, gum bichromate, platinum, wet-plate collodion, and salted paper were argued about ceaselessly in the photographic societies of the day.Д®nter gelatin silver paper, and these processes took a back seat to the sharp вЂnвЂ™ shiny school of thought that gelatin silver paper spawned, so much so that for most of the 1900s photographers did not even know вЂњaltвЂќ existed, and much less did they practice it. Photographers were falling over each other to discover the next greatest thing, write the latest book, file the latest patent, and be accepted into the latest salon. In the mid- to late-1800s what we now call вЂњalternative process photographyвЂќ was the norm.

A new monograph has recently entered this field, and quietly so-a fitting entrance for an unassuming man who has dedicated his life to teaching and practicing the art of photography and alternative processes for no less than forty years. The field of alternative process photography is ripe for the harvest in a fine-art world where large color digital works are the norm. Sam WangвЂ™s book вЂњFour Decades of Photographic ExplorationsвЂќ

Andersson reviews Sam Wangs book Four Decades of Photographic Explorations.

Alternative to tidy plates