For oldster in tech age, wet plate like ‘magic’
KANSAS CITY, Mo. — A 9-year-old Jeff Schotland stood transfixed as the film negative swirled in the developer solution.
Slowly, silhouetted faces began to appear: the curve of an ear, a nose.
Then, more fully formed details: a freckle, a mole.
“It was like magic. It was the coolest thing I have ever seen,” Schotland said of that first darkroom visit, watching the father of his childhood friend. “I decided then, I was doing this.”
For more than 40 years, Schotland fulfilled a version of that dream. He put the artsy film portraiture he prefers on the back burner and made a living by mostly doing “nasty" commercial work, lately on digital cameras.
But a few years ago, Schotland wanted to slow down and return to the magic he felt in developing film. While surfing online, he saw images made using wet collodion, sometimes referred to as wet plate.
The 19th-century process is laborious, but the black-and-white result is textured and dynamic. The dark blacks, blurry edges and intense detail have sparked an uptick in professional photographers’ interest in the process in a competitive field saturated in Photoshopped digital images.
So, to learn more, Schotland ordered a few books online and signed up for a workshop. He estimates that fewer than 7,000 people worldwide are experimenting with wet plate, and far fewer are doing it professionally.
In his northern Kansas City studio, his cabinets are filled with chemicals, beakers and containers.
He looks and sounds like a mad scientist as he snaps on black latex gloves and goes into the chemical properties of each solution, casually dropping words such as “potassium bromide” and “nitrocellulose” as he works.
“Some of it still goes over my head,” said Earl Richardson, another local wet-plate practitioner and friend of Schotland's. “Jeff has been my collodion tormentor — he’s my collodion mentor.”
Richardson and Schotland, who were friends at the University of Kansas, reconnected a few years ago.
In recent years, Richardson has made his living photographing college campuses — beautiful university foliage and bright smiles that end up in glossy pamphlets sent to prospective students. During a week of shooting, he will return home with more than 20,000 images to edit.
In December 2013, he sat in his Lawrence home with “Chemical Pictures: The Wet Plate Collodion Book,” by photographer Quinn Jacobson.
When he opened the book, Richardson said, "I thought: 'This is so complicated. I don’t know if I can do this.'"
Then he had a session with Schotland.
First, Schotland takes a piece of black stained glass (Plexiglas, aluminum and tin are also popular materials). Then he pours on the collodion. Practitioners have to make their own — he uses a mixture of Everclear grain alcohol, dissolved cotton balls, salt and ether.
The collodion’s consistency is like honey, and Schotland slowly tilts the glass plate back and forth, up and down as he pours, willing the mixture into the corners. Then the plate goes into a closed metal container filled with silver nitrate for four minutes. This makes the plate light-sensitive. The plate is placed in the camera and then it’s, at most, a 15-minute race to snap the photo before the chemicals dry.
The process requires precision. The wrong mix of chemicals, fingerprints or small pieces of dust can muddy the photo ( some people purposefully “dirty” their plates for a rougher look, but Schotland hates that). The exactness required is why many modern practitioners prefer to do wet- plate portraits in a controlled indoor environment.
“You think about the people who were out in the Civil War, with a horse carriage, maybe getting shot at; it stuns me that they were able to produce the imagery they were able to produce,” Richardson said.
The process peaked during the Civil War, said April Watson, curator of photography at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City. Frederick Scott Archer invented it in 1851, and for 30 years it brought photographs into homes of the everyday person.
The Nelson has about 1,400 photos made using the wet-plate technique.
“I would say there’s definitely been an uptick in interest in the process as a sort of reaction to the digital instantaneity and mass barrage of digital imagery,” Watson said.
It’s the reaction Richardson and Schotland both had — to slow down and return to an older medium.
In his book “The Revenge of Analog,” author David Sax tracks the recent rise in once- antiquated niche markets, such as independent bookstores, vinyl- record stores and film photography.
“A niche market can become a mass market; I think that’s something that people can forget,” Sax said by phone from Toronto. “I think we got into this idea that you have to create the next billion-dollar app. That’s just not true.”
People are turning away from digital modernity and toward an authentic nostalgia, Sax said.
Older photographers want to return to the development process; young generations want the experience of feeling a piece of film in their hands.
Sax cited Fujifilms’ instant-film cameras as the most obvious example in photography: The company sold more than 5 million of them in 2015.
Schotland estimates that he has made about $6,000 doing wet plate, not enough to cover his expenses. For him and for Richardson, though, the money isn't a high priority.
After snapping an image, Schotland gingerly takes the plate back into the cramped darkroom. He drops it into the tray of developer solution, and slowly the black glass transforms: first a silhouetted head with two large ears appears, then a halfsmile and deep freckles.
Schotland turns with a smile.
“This is why I do this. Isn’t it just like magic?”