I'm Kyle McMillin. What I bring to a sitting is a reverence for the materials and for the act of making a photograph. I care about people, about their lives and memories, and in wet-plate I’ve found a way to join that care with my lifelong fascination with image-making: painting, and film, and the wonder that became the camera, light passing into a dark room and casting the world on its wall. The medium is both incidental and essential.
The process allows slowness as much as it demands it. I use that time to orient, to explore, to gently guide, and ultimately to discover. Everything I know goes toward making a good image, and what makes an image good has everything to do with what’s possible in that moment alone.
I work with people marking occasions of all kinds: engagements, anniversaries, pregnancies, births, landmark moments of change or transformation, or the end of a life. And sometimes just making a mark.
My studio sits on the shore in Kingston, WA, in a workshop-garage that overlooks the water, across which the Space Needle winks between Mount Rainier's looming rise and the hills of Ballard and Queen Anne.
The Red Room. The name wasn’t thought up, it arrived. Wet-plate chemistry is blind to red light, so the darkroom glows red. When I built my first darkroom out of blackout curtains, I chose red ones as a nod to David Lynch. Then, looking at Goodwill for a rug to cover the paint-encrusted floor of my first studio, I found a black-and-white chevron. If you’ve seen Twin Peaks, you’ll put the pieces together. In Kingston, my darkroom windows are tinted red, so the room is lit only by the sun.
