Working closely with the wet-plate photographer Robert Kenney, BCreative develops content for his company blog that engages the history, ideas and emotions sparking his work.
This is a blind jump. After more than 20 years as a successful commercial photographer, working with cameras that are technically perfect (and now digitally flawless), I’m going into a dark room. An unknown prospect. Having only recently taken up the wet plate collodion process, I haven’t yet fully learned to control its variables. I wonder if that’s the point. Already the medium is challenging my idea of what makes for a good photograph. I think the wounded images that result look beautiful. As if these people are falling back through time. And pulling me with them.
Some history. The wet plate collodion process was introduced in the middle of the 1800s and quickly overtook the daguerreotype as the most practical means of achieving a photograph. These were early days for photography, a wild west of invention, and the first practitioners were more chemists than visual aesthetes. The key advantage for the time was that the collodion process produced a negative image which could be replicated. But it was challenging, messy and risky. And time-sensitive. The photograph had to be taken and developed before the wet plate dried, typically in less than 15 minutes.
The draw was the drama revealed in the image; the depth and details in the print were so much more compelling. It was as if people (whatever their grim rectitude) were alive for the first time on film. The modern likeness was born.
During the American Civil War, early photographers, including the great Mathew Brady, made that bloody conflict more visceral and quietly poignant. All of these battle scenes and stoic men were shot using the collodion process, requiring photographers to travel with portable darkrooms.
Another curious fact is that Lewis Carroll shot an ambiguously suggestive picture of the real-life Alice, then an innocent 6 years old, before casting her in his Wonderland. The English poet, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, a contemporary, called the portrait the most evocative image he had ever seen. Suddenly the camera could both show, and betray, innocence. The collodion process made photography a much greater force for social change.
I first came across collodion prints in a contemporary context through the work of the American photographer, Sally Mann. I was immediately spellbound. Her work struck a deep chord in me. Manipulating the collodion process like a master alchemist, Mann presents images of her family and the landscapes of her southern roots that are distorted, raw, and hauntingly beautiful. These photographs still hold me in a trance. They made me reconsider my own approach to photography and question my understanding of beauty. They are the jumping off point for this journey.
This is an experiment in freedom. Both in my professional career and personal matters, I aim to be precise and properly measured. I’ve learned to give an audience what it expects. But the appeal for me in the collodion process is that even the broken can be beautiful. My search now is to capture something authentic in my subject, to open a crack in the surface of appearance that reveals a deeper experience. This blog will chart that search. It will be candid and curious. It will be something that I don’t expect but that will be true of me.
