about the red room

About

flowing collodion onto the plate: step 1

I was introduced to the wet-plate collodion (tintype) process at a workshop in 2019 and have been making them continually since then. The light sensitive emulsion (or ‘film’) of each image is created using liquid chemistry minutes before the exposure is made (while still wet), and developed & fixed immediately after. Every tintype I make is a long exposure photograph; I've never used a shutter. The person(s) in front of the camera must hold very still for many seconds, and that time is compounded and imprinted on the plate continually during this time. The final image at the end is a mirror of that short space of time.

Making images in a long-exposure medium from the 1800s requires presence, patience, and work––I often say that sitting for a tintype is more like sitting for a painting than any modern photograph. This is what initially drew me to the process: the intentionality of it, together with an openness to the unknown. We're working with wet chemistry. We're sitting quite still. We're painting with light. And we're staying open to the ebb and flow of time and happenstance, waiting to see how the chemistry will dance along the edges of the frame, or seep into the image and become a new element or presence. And there's always a bit of movement––we're living, breathing creatures after all.

the groundglass of the camera:
framing & focussing

pouring fixer to reveal the positive image

The process speaks to both sides of our lived experience, the physical and the metaphysical. For me, this kind of photography is as much about life as it is about death. My 20's were defined by loss, and my relationship (companionship) with death and loss seems to have been a direct path to working in a medium that has so much to do with memory (and, therefore, death), where I hold space for the individuals I work with and all of their beautiful anxieties and strengths and pains and their complicated relationships with themselves, and with their image and their body and with death and life as it unfolds. My aim is to honor everyone I work with, and create an image that can be treasured for many years and generations to come.

I also explore images through various forms of print-making, often transferring images onto materials such as wood, canvas, discarded paper, and glass––all of which I gather from scrap-piles and second-hand sources. I may start sharing these here soon.