Wet plate collodion process

Devil’s Thumb circa 1871 (well, 2014, actually). Boulder, Colorado

I had to rent a mule to get all my gear up to the base of the Flatirons the other day. It would have been tough to get it all on my back–the wooden camera and tripod (42 pounds right there), then the glass plates, the chemicals, and my portable darkroom I jury-rigged out of canvas and two-by-fours purchased from McGuckin Hardware. After prepping then exposing the first plate, the cold temperatures made it a royal pain to get the thing into the darkroom and developed within the necessary ten minutes or so–required, as a plate that goes dry becomes nothing more than a fragile paperweight.

In all, it took me about two hours to get up there and set up, then another hour to prepare the plate, get it to the camera, compose, trip the shutter (that is, take the lens cap off for about three minutes), and then develop that one plate. This doesn’t count the darkroom hours back home doing the printing (used up more than a few eggs with that) and then scanning it and converting it to digital so you could see it here.

Definitely more work than just carrying my digital Nikon up the hill in my waist pack.

Yo–gotcha! (Maybe?)

Yes, I definitely have a lot of admiration for those first photographers who ventured out in the field with their horse-drawn mini-labs to make photographs using the wet plate collodion process. Typically, they traveled with everything in a covered wagon that carried all their equipment and doubled as a darkroom. You can get an idea of how the complicated process worked HERE.

Perhaps one of the most famous photographers to use this wet plate process was Mathew Brady. His Civil War photographs (the first systematic wartime photojournalistic effort?) are classic and he was nearly killed getting a few of them. He was also famous for his portraits–he photographed a boatload of famous Civil War figures, including a young officer named Custer (“Custer wore an Arrow shirt”), and 18 different Presidents, the most famous being Lincoln (that’s Brady’s wet plate photo of Abe on the $5 bill and in your high school history textbook).

William Henry Jackson also used the process in his western landscapes (especially Colorado!). We may have him to thank for the establishment of Yellowstone National Park as he showed the public visually exactly what was in that geologically bizarre area of the country.

Then there was Carleton Watkins, a California photographer and sort of a predecessor of Ansel Adams in the San Francisco and Yosemite area.

Finally, you have also likely seen the famous image from the Crimean War, “Valley of the Shadow of Death“, done by Roger Fenton–the one with the cannonballs on the open field (that some suspect were deliberately placed there before making the photograph). That was wet plate collodion. If you go to that Roger Fenton link I provided you can see that image as well as a picture of his “photography van”.

Pretty amazing, difficult, uncomfortable work for all these guys.

In the modern era, there are still people who use this wet plate process for their artwork. Sally Mann is one such photographer and her work is quite emotional, personal, and thought-provoking. She first made a name for herself with her photographs of her children during their summer retreats–some nude, which at the time had the Puritan sector with their panties in a wad. One of her more recent projects is a study of the “body farm” where budding forensic experts learn all about the decomposition of the human body. (Not for the cardiac-impaired!) She has also done a long-term photographic study of the effects of muscular dystrophy on her husband that is quite powerful. In everything she does the collodion process, to my eye, adds an additional layer of emotion and mood–the photographs just would not be the same if they were tack sharp Hasselblad pictures with perfect studio lighting.

So, yes, I like the random visual imperfections of this photographic process. Today, of course, the effect can be simulated with various plugins. The fact that you can simulate the look is surely an anathema to those who actually go through the work of creating a wet plate glass negative, then the albumen print…which leads to an interesting philosophical question:

Is it process or the final product? Does it make a difference how a photograph is made? Or, is it simply a matter of the artistic merits of the final product? But all that seems like a good topic for another day.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to go feed the mule.