Frederick Scott Archer introduced the wet plate collodion process in 1851. The process allowed a repeatable negative to be created, which was an improvement upon the unique image produced by the daguerreotype process. Another advantage of the wet plate negative was the sharp reproduction of detail, which the paper negatives of the day lacked. I am not interested in either of those benefits.

Ambrotypes, like daguerrotypes, are unique images. Created by placing a dark background behind an underexposed wet plate negative, the resultant positive image can be displayed as soon as it comes out of the camera and is developed, dried, and varnished, with no printing required. There is something beautiful about the absence of that intermediary, the fact that the light that bounces off of my subject strikes the sensitized plate and the final image is made in the camera, the result of this direct interaction.

The wet plate practitioners of the past were masters. Their exposures were exact, their plates flawlessly poured. I am more interested in collaboration with this process than mastery of it. The serendipitous mistakes, anomalies, and flaws that would have ruined one's plate during the 19th century are the same aesthetic occurrences that draw me to this process.