This blog will chart my wet plate collodian journey. I am very excited to have been awarded the Professional Development bursary in order to learn this process, and gain the skills (and confidence!) in order to create a project using this ancient technique.
It happened.
I can’t quite believe it.
I remember when I got the news that I had received the a-n bursary. I jumped into the living room where my husband was sat watchign tv and shouted “I got the bursary!”. His response was, “Well, you have to do the project now.”
Which was a good point! I had spent so long thinking about this project, planning what I would do if one day I had the time and money to do it, that I was almost past believing that it would actually happen. The best thing about getting this bursary, for me, was that it gave me the impetus to make it happen.
And happen it did. The show opened on 13 November, 2 days after the 100th anniversary of the Armistice. Lots of visitors, including the Mayor of Altrincham, attended the Private View. Over the ten days of the show being up, we had 300 visitors; which is not bad for a small town just south of Manchester. In the middle weekend there was a well attended event with the Imperial War Museum.
Feedback has been wonderful; it feels so good to have done this. I’m very proud of it and looking forward to exhibiting it again soon. Thank you, a-n, for helping make it happen.
Here are some installation pictures of the exhibition:
It’s ready!
I have completed my wet plate collodion journey, and am ready to exhibit the works.
The 29 ambrotypes of current male residents of Altrincham represent each of the men from Chapel St who failed to return from the Great War. They will be exhibited alongside another new work, At Rest, at the exhibition at AIR Gallery, Altrincham from 14 – 24 November 2018.
It’s been a while since my last blog post. But it’s been a VERY productive while.
I’ve learnt loads since then. I can now say that I’m pretty confident at the wet plate collodion process. As well as creating many (failed) experiements, I have managed to succeed in my quest to make 29 ambrotypes of male residents of Altrincham, South Manchester.
Why?!
Because this journey was ultimately to learn the processes required to make a body of work which had been in my head for almost two years. I’ve been wanting to create a memorial to the lost men of Chapel Street, Altrincham. When WW1 broke out, 161 men from this small street enlisted; 29 failed to return, and a further 20 died of their wounds. The street was razed to the ground in the 1950’s, and with it the story was lost. Until recently, when a blue plaque was erected on the building near where the street once stood.
I wanted to create a memorial to these men. I wanted to photograph current male residents of Altrincham, but I wanted their image to be on glass, to reflect the fragility of life. Wet plate collodion allows me to do this.
Shooting was incredibly enjoyable. I recruited the men through social media, and had many volunteers. The process is slow, and reflective, and produces unique (and sometimes unexpected!) results. The images are ghostly and transport us back in time…
The final work will be exhibited in the town of Altrincham from 15 November, at AIR Gallery. All are welcome!
The first step of this journey is to learn this process. I enrolled on an Introduction to Wet Plate Collodion Course at Photofusion, South London. The course is run by Daniel Barter, a wet plate collodion professional, and a great teacher.
This course focused on the process of wet plate in the creation of tintypes. This is a method of creating a positive image directly onto an aluminium plate. It’s almost like creating a postitive film from scratch; collodion is poured onto the plate, sensitised in silver nitrate, and then placed into the back of the camera as is (wet) so that it can be exposed. A lot of light is needed for this process; on this course, we focused on creating portraits, whereby the subjects are flooded under UV (or continuous) light.
The results are magical. Once the plate is exposed, it is developed and fixed. As the chemistry in the process is only sensitive to UV light, colours react differently than in black and white film. Blue eyes, for example, become piercing and bright. And, due to the long exposure, the results are often blurred which create an ethereal feel.
Carole Evans is a photographic artist, cultural organizer and educator. As a photographer and researcher, Carole is interested in memory and how photography can be used to evoke and (re) construct memory. Themes of heritage, nostalgia, and community are recurrent in her practice. Current work in progress is a project which will attempt to memorialise the 49 men from "the bravest little street in England," who failed to return home after the Great War. After seven years of working as Gallery Coordinator at Photofusion in Brixton, Carole continuously explores alternative ways of showing work outside the white walled gallery space, be it through her practice or in other curatorial ways. In 2011, she co-founded of Portrait Salon, a salon de refusés of images which have been rejected from the Taylor Wessing Prize organised by the National Portrait Gallery. In 2013 she devised and curated the Altrincham Arts Festival, a pop-up arts festival turning empty shops into temporary art galleries. She is currently Associate Senior Lecturer in Contextual Studies at Ravensbourne, and is Dissertation Supervisor for the Photography BA (hons) at University of the Arts Farnham, where she also contributes to the Theory Lecture programme.
