Wet Plate Collodion Amid Pandemic
Shortly after Yosemite trip, Covid-19 virus started to really spread. Everything stopped, people were ordered to stay inside as much as possible, and life seemed to have frozen in its tracks. I isolated myself in my studio/darkroom, and, like I’m sure many among us, fell into a bit of a depression, in part due to losing all prospects of work for the foreseeable future.
For days and weeks, I meandered about my little space, cleaning, organizing, maintaining chemistry, reading, sleeping way more than usual… When going outside, it was strange not to see people’s smiles or even frowns; everyone was masked, and crossed the street upon approach as if whoever was coming their was wielding a machete and was covered in pig blood. It was weird. I found myself staying in the darkroom longer and longer, days seem to stretch on without end.
There have been other periods in my life when energy was low, so low that it seemed hopeless. In the past, making art was what never failed to dispel those clouds, and so I knew I needed to shoot something; something new for me, something that would push the limits of my own comfort zone.
Depression makes you feel small, alone, defenseless, and venerable. When there’s nowhere to go and no motivation to do anything, even walls of my cozy and dearly beloved little studio start to seem like a cage.
In the past I rarely turned my camera upon myself, I’m not Cindy Sherman, but occasionally a self-portrait idea seems valid and worthy, and so it did this time around. I also don’t usually shoot nudes, and certainly never before have pictured myself a la natural, so this was going to be a push in a new direction.
I knew that my friend Justin, whose office is in next building over, had a small collection of vintage gas masks, so I asked to borrow one with a long tube, which resembles an elephant trunk. After all, elephants never forget. They never forget the good times they had, and they know where water is even amid historic drought.
A fun challenge when doing self-portraits with wet plate is how to handle lighting and camera operation. In studio I use flash, and usually trigger it with a light meter, which is the only thing I now use that tool for. However, I didn’t want to have anything electronic in my hands, or have the cord showing. Fun solution was to hide the light meter in background folds in the corner, get in position, and find the trigger button with my pinky toe. Below are the two 4x5 ambrotype images I made that evening. One was made on deep purple glass, and one on green.
First attempt was made on green glass. When I saw it after clearing in fixer, I wasn’t convinced that it’s the best I could do, so went for the purple one. Satisfied with that outcome, I turned my attention back to green plate, and figured out how it needed to be finished in order to make me happy. Ambrotypes on colored glass, traditionally known as ‘ruby glass’ ambrotypes no matter what color glass is actually used, have an interesting quality. When you lay them down on a table or anything darker than medium grey, they look almost perfectly like a tintype, or usual black-backed ambrotypes. Some cast may remain, especially under strong lighting, and you can see a bit of it in the purple plate above. When you back them up with black, almost no color comes bath through, but put something white behind them and you get a great duochrome effect. Green is a color often associated with disease, and all the collodion artifacts that appeared around me in first plate seemed reminiscent of swirls of air, laden with Covid particles, ready to envelop and attack me. To create the above affect, green ambrotype was backed with white mat board, and the area I wanted to have no color was painted black.
I was really happy with how both plates came out, and was even happier when, while picking up the loaned mask, Justin saw the purple one and purchased it on the spot. In fact, he liked it so much that he wanted to see how he would look in similar setting and on larger 8x10 plate. A few days later, tintype below was born.
Meanwhile the virus raged on. It was not long until worldwide death toll reached 100.000. Justin had been collecting newspapers with large pandemic-related headlines, and suggested making a plate with the paper from the day this grim milestone was reached. Bus stop location was selected to represent the old mundane routine in a new way. Tintypes are always laterally reversed, so writing there is backwards, and that adds another small part to the surreal situation we all found ourselves in.
A few months passed, and US surged in number of Covid-19 cases as if it was a numbers race to impress the whole world. Well, the world was very impressed. Impressed with sheer stupidity of anti-maskers, complete disconnect of current government officials from science and common sense, their inability to act according to protocols set up for decades for just these types of emergencies, with amount of lying and concealing, stonewalling and demagoguery; basically impressed all around. In what seemed like no time at all, death toll hit 100.000 in just USA. Among them were my great aunt, who, up until the virus, was going strong at her age of 92, and had to die alone with none of her few remaining relatives around her. I also hear of the passing of very kind and talented artist I knew and interacted with a lot, who lived in upstate New York and was I believe in his late 50s. Debates though raged on. Is it worth shutting down the economy over a few saved lives? I doubt it’s a question many of those who personally know someone who died would be asking, but the voices of oblivious were ringing louder and louder. Plus, terrible things kept happening again and again with police brutality reaching boiling points, and erupting in protests all over the country. And then there’s the fact that’s in an election year, and there’s a good percentage of population who are very rightly worried about actual survival of democracy this time around, and so conversation around that topic got louder and louder. Basically, the virus seemed to have fallen in ranking of importance, and life seemed to have moved right along. So with the 100.000 US deaths headline, we made the following plate.
Of all above plates, only the green 4x5 ambrotype remains available. All 8x10in plates have been purchased by private collectors, and, as mentioned above, purple 4x5 is residing with Justin.
Anton
