WASHINGTON, DC.- Irvine Contemporary announced the opening of Phil Nesmith’s first solo exhibition, My Baghdad, a series of photographs shot in Baghdad and produced on glass plates using a dry plate ambrotype process. A set of editioned C-print enlargements from the glass plates will accompany the unique images in the exhibition. The exhibition is on view from January 12 – February 17.

Contemporary photographers have frequently recovered earlier photographic processes to reinterpret image making and familiar genres of photography. Chuck Close’s daguerreotype portraits, Sally Mann’s wet plate collodion images, and Adam Fuss’s combined daguerreotype and photogram images have become part of the visual language of photography today.

Photographic images made with daguerreotype and other glass plate photographic processes are inextricably connected to American Civil War photographs and to the look and feel of these images in our cultural memory. For his series of photographs shot in Iraq , Phil Nesmith has recovered the dryplate ambrotype, an earlier process also used during the Civil War, which is made through a positive exposure on a hand-poured silver emulsion on glass plates. His black glass ambrotypes provide a compelling new context for representing photographs taken in Baghdad during the current war in Iraq . Phil Nesmith's new series of images are at once haunting, personal, and reflect back on our cultural memory of images in wartime.

Phil Nesmith studied photography at the Rocky Mountain School of Photography, and now lives and works in Washington , DC . His portfolio of images from Iraq was selected for Camera Arts, Nov-Dec., 2007.