(dramatic music) - [Matt] Explore a trio of artistic visions along the Erie Canal.

And catch a performance from Bluebird Strings.

It's all ahead on this episode of "Aha."

(string instrument music) - [Narrator] Funding for "Aha" has been provided by your contribution and by contributions to the WMHT Venture Fund.

Contributors include the Leo Cox Beach Philanthropic Foundation, Chet and Karen Opalka, Robert and Doris Fischer Malesardi, and the Robison Family Foundation.

- At M&T Bank, we understand that the vitality of our communities is crucial to our continued success.

That's why we take an active role in our community.

M&T Bank is pleased to support WMHT programming that highlights the arts, and we invite you to do the same.

(electronic music) - Hi, I'm Matt Rogowicz, and this is "Aha, A House for Arts," a place for all things creative.

The New York State Canal Corporation's Artists and Residence Program invites artists to explore the significance of the Eric Canal through art.

As part of WMHT's multi-platform series called "Reflections on the Erie Canal," producer Katherine Rafferty spent time with the 2024 artists and residents to see the Erie Canal through their unique perspectives.

(gentle music) - The fact that this is the bicentennial really underscores to me just this sense of time and place and the interconnectedness of us living on the canal with the people that built it 200 years ago.

It really puts us on the continuum of canal communities.

I grew up here in Rochester, and my family are from the Finger Lakes region and have lived here for a really long time, so I've always felt pretty attached to this landscape.

When I was in college, I took a class on landscape cinematography, and it got me really interested in how narratives are expressed through landscape.

I just started thinking that there was this real strangeness to the simultaneous artificiality of the canal and the natural environment sort of folding in on one another.

It just seemed like that was the key to this history, particularly the religious and spiritual and political history of Western New York.

There was a very rapid exchange of ideas and the turnover in political ideas and philosophies and ideas about the best way to organize society was just changing at an incredibly rapid pace, that people really had never seen before.

And a lot of people were really just trying to make sense of all of that change.

But sort of running parallel to that is this idea that there is a flow of energy running through the landscape that was ripped open by the canal, by the building of this artificial river, that sort of ruptured the landscape in a way that could never be undone.

I am hoping that people look at my images and can get a sense of that transcendence, especially the process of going out and photographing these spaces where major spiritual events occurred.

I really wanna put myself in the mindset of somebody who might have experienced that kind of spiritual ecstasy.

I think that it's very easy to see the world in a very solid, materialist way, and I want to make people uncertain of that materiality and maybe just open to the idea that there is something beyond our literal experience and that it's possible to document it.

(bright music) - The tintype, the process is basically I'm creating my own film.

This was discovered in the 1850s.

So with that, it carries kind of a historical look with this black and white process, and I was captivated from day one, so I wanted to learn it.

Since then, I'm using the process to compare current social and political issues with history.

I didn't grow up in this country, so I didn't have a wide education of history, where you could learn about the Erie Canal.

So I started to learn about it.

Reading about it, I went to the Erie Canal Museum, and I saw a lot of images of a man working on the canal.

I think there was maybe half a wall dedicated to women working on the canal.

So I was thinking that it would be a very interesting project to kind of compare where we were at the time when the Erie Canal was constructed and the early years of the Erie Canal and where women are now as far as working.

I was fortunate enough to work with the Canal Corporation, so I had a list of women who were working for the canals and also women who didn't work directly with the canal, but they were associated with their work.

Women were very excited.

Many women saying that, you know, it's really cool because we have 50 men in the office, and there's four of us are women.

So they kind of thought that this project was very important for them.

So I create my own film on a piece of aluminum, using my own mixture called collodion that has bromide and iodine salts in it, which will have to react with silver nitrate.

So after I floated the plate with this sticky substance, I have to immerse it in silver nitrate solution for about two or three minutes.

And after taking it out, the silver nitrate reacts with the bromide and iodine and creates this light sensitive substance.

And I put it in a plate holder, which is light tight, and I put the plate holder into the camera and expose it, and after that, I develop it and fix it in the dark room.

This process is a little bit cumbersome 'cause you have to carry your own dark room with you for development.

It's a little bit of a schlep before and after each shoot.

(liquid sloshes) Wow, that actually really came out a really good texture.

- [Photographer] Yeah, crisp.

- So if you have time for one more.

- Sure.

- This is a really good one though.

Woo-hoo, got it.

So the main point that I would like people to think about one day looking at my images, is the road that we traveled from the women's rights movement.

When you look at those portraits and the women who are filling jobs that, in the 19th century were not heard of or not, couldn't even think about filling with a woman.

Now we are here, and we traveled a long ways from the women rights movement, but we are still have a long, long road in front of us to, for, to gender equality.

(saxophone music) (gentle music) - For me, photography is about slowing down and also showing people a slightly different angle of things and having them think about it a little bit more.

What did we lose when we took those canals out, and how can we not lose that again in other projects?

I like to show how things change.

My photography is always time-based, and by that, I mean I usually have my camera on a tripod, and by having it on a tripod, I can then control time in a very obvious way, that I can do long exposures, and I can set up the camera in a way that I can repeat that location again in certain places.

Doing still photography of long exposures of ships and trains and other vessels on the Hudson River and other places.

And I thought that the canals would be an interesting subject to continue with that.

The previous body of work is called "Middle Eastern Promises," and I did it in Israel and Palestine from 2014 to about 2017, 2018 on a few different trips.

I found a set of stereoscopic cards from the 1900s, which had basically two photos of the same place photographed with a camera that had two lenses.

I thought, oh, it would be interesting to photograph those locations again and combine that.

So one photograph would be the new and one would be the old.

When I applied for the residency, I thought that I'm sure the Erie Canal Museum will have a bunch of old historical photos, content that I can work with.

So that really got me excited about it.

I thought, oh, this could be really kind of bring back my experience of doing those photographs again to a local landscape.

Each photo that I re-shoot now takes about two hours to set up, find the right location, not even including the research that I have to do about that, but once I'm on location, set up the camera, move it slowly on the tripod from left to right to match the perspective of the original photo.

And I use tilt shift lenses that allow me to raise and change the perspective of the camera accordingly.

So that helps with those, matching those older photos.

So it's a long and involved process and sometime even after a couple hours, I'm giving up, it's just not matching.

I don't know what they did exactly, but it's not matching.

But when it does match and I'm right there and everything clicks, I'm transported in time to that original photo.

(bright music) I really felt that sometimes, I'm on the banks of the canal.

It was a very interesting feeling to know that now it's a road in Syracuse, for example, and looking at the photo on my iPad or on the print, I can kind of see that I'm standing on the bank of the canal now and it's now the sidewalk, and I can feel a little bit of what they felt there.

So I'm a little bit transported in time.

(bright music) (gentle music) - You can watch more from "Reflections on the Erie Canal" at wmht.org/eriecanal.

Please welcome Bluebird Strings.

(string instrument music) (string instrument music) (string instrument music) (string instrument music) Thanks for joining us.

For more arts, visit wmht.org/aha and be sure to connect with us on social.

I'm Matt Rogowicz.

Thanks for watching.

(electronic music) - [Narrator] Funding for "Aha" has been provided by your contribution and by contributions to the WMHT Venture Fund.

Contributors include the Leo Cox Beach Philanthropic Foundation, Chet and Karen Opalka, Robert and Doris Fischer Malesardi, and the Robison Family Foundation.

- At M&T Bank, we understand that the vitality of our communities is crucial to our continued success.

That's why we take an active role in our community.

M&T Bank is pleased to support WMHT programming that highlights the arts, and we invite you to do the same.