Grounded in scientific elements of photography, Brittany Nelson explores the chemical reactions taking place under film, seemingly freezing a moment in time. For the past few years, she has explored mordançage, a photographic process originating in the 1800s which deteriorates the print’s nature, creating a soft, ghost-like bleached image. Her newer work dissects the elements of tintype photography, which she reinvents with novel chemical solutions and layered photoshopped imagery. By implementing the process and allowing the photograph to become denatured, her resulting image presents a poetically conflicting environment which is artificially derived yet organically formed. An emerging pioneer in alternate photographic processes, Nelson received her Bachelor of Arts at Montana State University (2007) and Master of Fine Arts in Photography at Cranbrook Academy of Art (2011). Born in Great Falls, Montana in 1984, she currently lives in Richmond, VA where she teaches photography at Virginia Commonwealth University and runs her own professional printing studio, Flatten Image.
