The speed of silver

Two decades after studying together, Richard Sibley reunites with photographer Rikard Österlund to sit for a portrait over 170 years in the making

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I first met Swedish photographer Rikard Österlund (and former AP Technical Editor Tim Coleman) on my first morning at Kent Institute of Art and Design, Rochester, where we would spend three years working on a degree in editorial and advertising photography. The worlds of film and digital photography were at a tipping point; one morning, we would get in early to grab an enlarger in the darkroom, and the next, we would scramble to get a Power Mac and Minolta scanner.

It had been over 20 years since I last saw Rikard, but it felt like we had never lost touch. Instagram and Facebook had acted as digital photo albums that we had seen from time to time, and we knew precisely the journeys we had been on since we had finished our degree.

‘After uni, I went straight into teaching and working commercially,’ says Rikard, who still lives and works in Rochester. ‘My commercial work began taking over everything, and it was all digital.’ The new world of digital photography appeared almost overnight and was a far cry from previous years when we spent our time crafting prints in the darkroom.

Physical

‘I spent all of this time looking at the screen on the back of the camera checking precise details, and then retouching the images in Photoshop and then delivering the images to clients that ended up being on a website. It just wasn’t anything physical any more,’ says Rikard.

It was seeing exhibitions of the work of Sally Mann and Julia Margaret Cameron when something changed for Rikard. ‘There was something otherwordly about the images,’ he recalls. ‘I had obviously seen wet plate images before, but it suddenly clicked that this was the process that they had both used.’