On AmbrotypesSunday, May 27, 2007 | 3:34AM |
After four years of waiting, and one year of hoping, and a few months of dying, I finally started making my first wet-plate collodion images a couple of weeks ago. Four years back, I went to a show at the Oswald Gallery in Austin, Texas that featured silver gelatin prints from wet-plate collodion negatives by Tom Baril. I had never seen anything like it before. While the subjects were mundane (flowers, fruits, still lifes, etc.) I noticed a few things I liked:
- Tomatoes were completely black. This meant collodion had little to no sensitivity to red light.
- The edges of frames were rough, but in a naturally formed way, much like how hand-made paper doesn’t really look torn on the edges.
- There were no detectable grain, even with enlargements of 20x24 and up.
- The quality of light was simply indescribable (and it still is!).
Immediately I set out to discover how it was done. I didn’t really know much about wet-plate, so I tried to find ways to mimic its properties. I was already using large format negatives, and a teacher suggested burning/melting the edges. Yeah, no… that just created a rounded white edge in the print.
I tried putting a deep blue filter over my lens and shooting what has been called “ortho-panchromatic” film. In other words… orthochromatic = not sensitive to red light; panchromatic = sensitive to all visible wavelengths of light. Thus, “ortho-panchromatic” is slightly insensitive to red light (kinda’). Well, this didn’t really do much good. In theory it should work, but I never noticed much of a difference.
For a couple of years I constantly checked for workshops to come to Texas or nearby, but they never did. At the time, it would have been absurd to fly to Rochester to learn from the masters themselves and pay hundreds of dollars just to learn an archaic process from the mid-19th century.
But then an opportunity arose in early 2006. The Ostermans were coming to the Harry Ransom Center (home of the world’s first photograph and one copy of the Gutenberg Bible). The workshop would be one day, preceded by a lecture, and cost only a couple of hundred dollars. I took my voice recorder, and learned as much as I could in such a short time. We each made an image (except Mark actually exposed it) and got to take it home that day.
Then nothing.
It wasn’t until this Spring that I took an alternative process class here in grad school, and I used it as the opportunity to purchase all the chemistry and equipment to do the process. It was daunting. While I started at the beginning of the quarter (which lasts 10 weeks) it probably took 6 for everything to come in, and even now I’m still lacking a few things.
But the key is, I started doing it. I had to let the collodion sit for a week before using it, and filter the varnish a billion times (well, 20 times), but I started making images as soon as I could. And guess what… they were fogged.
I’ve never been so excited to see fogged images. And funny enough, my end goal has always been that aesthetic. So the idea now is to really get the process under my belt, learn it as best I can, and then probably revert to what I’m already doing. We’ll see how it goes.
And for the record… this is how a fogged plate looks (or as an “ambrotype”):
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