From December 4 to March 14, the Ola Foundation cultural space presents renowned photographer Māris Ločmelis’s solo exhibition - the multimedia project “Redzēt Laiku / Seeing Time”, which invites visitors to encounter one of the oldest and at the same time most intimate forms of photography - the wet plate collodion process.
For the first time in Latvia, the exhibition will feature 20 originals created through this unique, authentic 19th-century photographic process. Each work exists as a single copy, preserving an elusive, unrepeatable emotion and the atmosphere of the human inner world.
Looking Within
At the heart of the exhibition, visitors will encounter a symbolic well created by Māris Ločmelis - an audiovisual object made of microcement, glass, water, and sound. Looking into it, visitors find themselves not only before a work of art, but also in dialogue with themselves.
The well has always been a liminal space between the practical and the metaphorical - while quenching thirst, it also offers a glimpse into infinity, where time seems to have stopped. In the installation, sound vibrations are transmitted through the water, creating a living, continuous movement that echoes the exhibition’s central theme - a person’s conversation with their inner time.
Portraits
The portrait series began in 2016, when actor Mārtiņš Vilsons remained motionless in front of Ločmelis’s camera during a long, 8-second exposure. Since then, the artist has created more than 100 portraits, and visitors to Ola Foundation will see 20 originals for the first time.
Māris Ločmelis says: “When photographing these people, I consciously do not interfere in their world; I am simply glad that they are in front of my camera and that I can capture their time, their conversation with themselves. Yet this conversation turns out to be much broader, and the viewer of the portrait begins to participate in it through the distance of time, until time no longer matters. You are here and now, in conversation with yourself and in conversation with the viewer through the photograph. Through the image, this conversation becomes personalized; it becomes someone’s personal experience.”
An Ancient Technology
The wet plate collodion process was developed in 1851 and is still carried out using manual labor and homemade emulsion components. Creating a single portrait takes approximately half an hour, and Ločmelis believes that the most important thing is not to prevent a person from being genuine - without a filter, without a mask, without haste.
The artist has supplemented this ancient process with a developing method of his own design, creating the distinctive, subtly surreal visual structure of the portraits. In creating the portraits featured in the exhibition, Ločmelis has enriched the old technology with modern portrait-taking techniques and an image-developing method that produces the unique visual effects characteristic of his work. The photographer himself is convinced that this will be the project of his lifetime, with more to follow.
About the Photographer
Māris Ločmelis (1978) is a professional photographer with more than 20 years of experience in advertising photography, and for the past decade he has devoted himself to researching and developing the wet plate process. His works are held in the collection of the Latvian Museum of Photography, as well as in private collections in the United States, Germany, Italy, and elsewhere around the world.
Ločmelis studied photography at the Riga School of Style and Fashion, and later at the London College of Fashion, where he earned a master’s degree in fashion photography. He has held several solo exhibitions and participated in group exhibitions in Latvia, Lithuania, Mexico, Poland, and elsewhere.