This is a truly unique approach, a little wild, obsessive and ultimately invigorating for photography. Using antique plates, many partially broken and missing pieces, Kelvin Bown reconstructs what the original images might have looked like through endless experiments and hours of digital retouching. The old photographs, many of which were found in the Library of Congress, deal with the region. By choosing the theme of faith and holy places, Bown takes part in a kind of photographic revelation by bringing back to life these photographs, which had once been deprived of their documentary potential due to the damage. Despite the digital restorer’s claims to scientific objectivity, one suspects that he might “embellish” the photographs and thus reinvent them, a process through which he becomes, by proxy, a 19th-century photographer.
