Iterations

There’s something about wet plate photography that I can’t get out of my head. Maybe it’s the process, maybe it’s the unpredictable nature of it—Sally Mann calls it “the angel of uncertainty.” Or maybe it’s the permanence of the objects themselves. When you look at an image by Matthew Brady or Timothy O’Sullivan, for a moment you’re no longer part of the present. And I would argue that that sense of timelessness is one of the reasons a handful of modern photographers still choose to embrace the 170-year-old process.In 2018 there was a Sally Mann show at the National Gallery called A Thousand Crossings. It is by far my favorite show I’ve ever seen since I've been in DC and, in fact, I went back to see it about a half-dozen times. While I love her entire body of work, it was the wet plate work—both plates and prints—that I found myself gravitating to the most. Far from the pristine edge-to-edge sharpness of modern photos, they exude life, inexorably binding them to the maker.A couple weeks ago, I got an em