Palm Springs Photo Festival

<<a little bit of silver and a whole lot of light>>

It was four years ago that I first read about wet plate photography. The images were spectacular and had qualities that even the most advanced digital camera couldn't touch... In that moment, I was hooked. The more I read about this alternative process, the more I came to understand how raw and dirty and artful and authentic it was.

In a digital world where we could frantically point, shoot, and fire off a burst of images, wet plate seemed calculated and calm. And where our digital photographs were made up of nothing more than 1's and 0's, wet plate was film, one frame at a time, handmade in a darkroom. 

I was captivated by it- it was beautiful and it was so freaking hard core.

The wet plate process wasn't something to simply be 'picked up', self taught, or even learned on the internet. It was one of those artistic mediums that required enough finesse that only someone who'd mastered the skill could pass along to someone else. And so I waited- for four years, until the perfect opportunity arose for me to not only learn the process, but to do so from an artist who had been an incredible inspiration to me. 

This dude.

Meet Ian Ruhter. If you don't know who that is- for Heaven's sake, go check out this video and just try to not be inspired. The dude is legit. He's like many of us in that he schemed up some hair brained idea... in his case, to build the biggest camera in the world and make gigantic wet plates inside of it. Where he's different is that he actually followed through and pulled it off.

I don't even know how I found out this dude was teaching a workshop as part of the Palm Springs Photo Festival, but with only a few weeks to spare, I dropped everything, bought a ticket to CA, registered for the workshop, and flew across the country to make sure my butt was in one of those seats.


Welcome to Palm Springs folks... where even in April, the temps can hit the low hundreds... but holy smokes were those landscapes epic.


If Palm Springs wasn't beautiful enough... we spent our days during the festival in the quaint courtyard of these gorgeous villas. 100 degree heat or not, the place was spectacular.


And there it is my friends- that sweet aqua box truck where so many mind blowing images had been made... just sitting there for us to gawk at. The "Time Machine". (I swear I couldn't have been any more psyched by the artifact before me if I'd been in the freaking Smithsonian... it was a thing of beauty.) And the 'large format' camera that was nestled inside of it? Well, let's just say the unveiling of that nearly brought all of us nerdy photographers to our knees. (Enter gasps, 'holy craps', and other expletives here...)


That's a big lens, people.


Now- here's where that finesse I was talking about comes in... within the wet plate genre, there are several routes one can take- in this case, we were about to witness the making of one of the biggest ambrotypes (a positive image on glass) that had ever been made. And the subjects of that photograph?
Just us... no big deal.
 
Yep... that would be my face on one of Ian Ruhter's mammoth plates... (I almost don't care that I look like a slouchy, aloof, tourist with my lame hat and sunglasses. (Did I mention it was a hundred degrees?? Cut me some freakin' slack, people.)


Day two- and it's our turn to dance with an oldie but goodie 8x10 large format camera. (Keep in mind that I completely neglected to document any images from our 'chemistry lesson' where we learned to mix a myriad of intimidating substances that would hopefully result in a successful wet plate. I'm one of those people that sucked at science and math in highschool and college, but I swear I've never focused so hard and taken so many notes in my life... no time for picture taking here... so instead, how about some pretty palm trees...)


We were given a crash course on glass cleaning, collodion pouring, camera adjusting, exposure setting, light strobing, subject stabilizing, remote trigger shooting, (which with shaky hands is shockingly difficult we came to find out), plate developing and fixing, and most importantly, how to hold back the tears and avoid embarrassing yourself by screaming HO-LY CRAP! when you see your first wet plate develop before your eyes. It is magic- there's no other way to describe it.



And here is my plate...

Though I'd come to the workshop fully intending on making my first plate with Ian as my subject, I couldn't help but notice his babe of a girlfriend, Lauren. All I could see was how her wide brimmed hat was casting these amazing freckles of light all over her face and shoulders and I had to attempt to capture it.

After a lengthy setup, some serious patience on her part (and a sunburn), a little tweaking with the light, and a lot of guidance from Ian... I was stoked out of my mind when I saw this little number fade into fantastic while soaking in it's magic little bath of fix. And yeah, I might have even teared up a bit for a second there... and it's okay if you don't understand why I'd get emotional over some silver and some collodion and some water- but the dudes that were standing beside me do... and that's good enough for me.


Last but not least- the image doesn't appear as a positive until it's backed with a black background... so as backwards as it felt, the final step to these beautiful images was to literally roll over them with this black sticky mess called asphaltum. I'm not gonna lie- it almost made a few of us pee our pants, but we made it through...


To have this experience where, when, and with whom I did was nothing short of perfection. Ian Ruhter ended up being the perfect concoction of patient genius and neurotic neat freak with a sense of humor as dry as the high desert... and I honestly couldn't imagine learning the process from anyone else.

There's just something about the wet plate process that creates images with the kind of meaning and soul that we photographers can only dream of achieving. I still don't know if it's the process, the deliberate premeditation that goes into each image, or the simple act of getting your hands dirty... I just know that in my mind-

this is how pictures were meant to be taken.