I have a healthy obsession with analog and alternative photography. Among the many, many approaches to analog photography, I’d say the wet plate collodion ‘method’ -for lack of a better term- is the biggie; the most revered, most frustrating, most stunning. Why? Well I’d ask firstly whats so compelling about analog photography in the first place. For me, its about three things: The history, the process, and the aesthetic.

History

Wet plate photography is one of the earliest methods of the art, dating from the mid 19th century through the early 20th, when cellulose roll-film eventually succeeded it. The photography style dominant at that time was portraiture, necessitated by the fact that darkrooms had to be on site for immediate processing. Some adventurous photographers built mobile darkrooms, and gave the public its first real glimpses of never before seen subjects like far away landscapes, peoples, and wars. The effects of this new photography were enormous. Photos of the American West inspired pioneers and later settlers, photos of wild nature inspired the worlds first national parks. Photos of bloated corpses strewn across the fields of Antietam caused controversy in the sitting rooms across America. Ansel Adams got his first breakthrough with his photograph (and subsequent print) of Half-Dome in Yosemite using the wet plate process. I like this history; this era that our only view into comes from the single visual source: these wet plate photographs.

Process

The process to get a good collodion photograph is complex. That is a word I like to see. There are a million things to do wrong, and there is no forgiveness. And so it is as challenging to the photographer who attempted it in the 19th century as in the 21st. The process (simply speaking) goes like this:

The collodion (the liquid poured onto the plate) dries quickly, usually within 10 to 15 minutes. Therefore the glass must be sensitized, put in the camera, exposed for the right amount of time, and finally developed back in the darkroom before the liquid dries (Hence ‘wet plate’ photography…and also why those early photographers dragged whole dark-rooms around with them).

The liquid called collodion, which can be thought of as a activator for a chemical reaction, is poured evenly onto a clean piece of glass, exactly the size needed to fit in the camera (did I mention collodion is like, super explosive? Its a mix of nitrocellulose and ether). The glass with the quickly evaporating collodion on its surface is then brought into a darkroom and submerged in a ‘bath’ of silver nitrate, another lovely chemical that causes blindness and deep staining to anything that it comes in contact with. The silver nitrate penetrates and reacts with the layer of collodion, making a now light-sensitive coating on the glass.

Side note for the interested parties…The chemistry going on here is actually quite interesting, and is relevant to why this process is so cool. basically the collodion mixture that coats the glass contains potassium iodide and potassium bromide which, when combined with silver nitrate form silver iodide and silver bromide, two chemicals which are sensitive to light . This chemical reaction happens at a molecular level. Later film photography - no matter how large format it was - relied on silver halide crystals, which are macroscopic compared to the molecular size of the silver bromide and iodide. This means that even the incredible quality of film is no match for wet plate photographs in terms of resolution, and therefore collodion photography remains the highest resolution photography (analog or otherwise) to date.

Once the sensitization has completed, the plate glass can be loaded into the camera and brought out to take the photograph. Collodion photography has an ISO equivalent of somewhere around 0.1 - 0.5, compared to modern films in the hundreds or thousands. Because of this, we rely on either strong flashes, studio lights, or loooong exposure times to get decent photographs. Stopped down to f128, a single exposure might take 2-3 minutes in full sun on my camera. In studio settings, I usually shot with wide open aperture f4 under direct studio lighting, and could pull off exposures of around 8 seconds. Interestingly in an historical context, this explains why we almost never see photographs of action and movement in the 19th century…the process was simply not sensitive enough to capture movement.

To develop the plate, it is brought back in the darkroom and splashed evenly with ferrous sulphate, quickly rendering the photograph. under and over developing collodion is again very easy to do, and I tried my best to go by eye to gauge the development times, which worked fairly well. Professional wet-plate photographers generally time the development based on experience with the collodion (age, type etc.) and the ambient temperature of the darkroom, plates, and chemistry. Me? I’m not quite at that stage of skill yet, but my seat-of-the-pants approach gave me satisfactory results.

Aesthetic

In my case, aesthetic can be specified to a general placing of the subject into a out-of-place time; a view of a scene or a person in a style not contemporary nor familiar. The wet-plate aesthetic, specifically, is a friend posing for me, and outside the camera I see them the same as I have always seen them: in the current context of time and place. But when I develop the image I see a civil war recruit, an old-west gunfighter, or a victorian actress. The magic is that it doesnt require a pose or a costume; it is the image itself that is creating the feeling. I can, with a plate of class and some funny liquids, brew nostalgia. I can bestow antiquity into a subject, and remove all sense of modernity from them. It’s not quite time travel, but something close.