DAY 185

PORTRAITS

Wet Collodion

NOIR, POP BAND

During my years as a young portrait photographer, I was always looking to challenge myself artistically, compositionally, and technically. After I received the commission to shoot an up-and-coming pop duo, called Noir, I decided to shoot a modern band with old technology, using a method that was almost as old as photography itself.

Matthew Brady is a well-known American photographer from the mid-19^th century (see page 69), who used the wet-collodion method of making negatives in the field, quite literally, as I then did myself. Using a small tent, chemicals, and mixing trays to coat the negatives, I exposed them in the plate camera while the plate was still wet and sensitized, then fixed the negative image and let the glass plate dry. The whole process is arduous, especially if you do it all on your own, which I did on this occasion, channeling Brady and his team of Civil War photographers.

Suffice it to say that I have never tried this technique and process since, but I’m glad to have this one print, made from the negatives that I made in a tent, exposed, and then processed all in a matter of minutes during a spring day in a field in southern England. —SA