Gilbert Mayer, born in Basel in 1954, worked as an advertising specialist and commissioned film producer after completing his studies in economics in Basel. After 2010, he began to focus intensively on analog black-and-white photography. He attended workshops and internships with renowned masters of their craft, including Dominique Granier in Paris, Sebastiao Salgado's printer, to further his education in darkroom techniques and large-format photography. In 2017, he showed his photo series "Street Views" in an exhibition at the Gemsberg Keller in Basel. This was followed in 2019 by an exhibition of landscape photographs at the Pellegrini Gallery in Murten. In 2020, Gilbert Mayer learned the technique of wet plate collodion photography from Christian Klant. Salt printing, albumen printing, cyanotype, and carbon printing were added as new positive processes, representing an important expansion of the design tools available for creating artistically unique images. Since February 2021, Gilbert Mayer has been working on two projects in which these processes are being used. The work at the Natural History Museum is still ongoing and will capture the final state of the collection in the old Berri building. For the portrait series of string puppets from the Basel Puppet Theater, 129 wet plates were photographed on 121 plates.
