In my eyes, the portrait of a person only becomes a good photograph, when it invites the contemplator to listen to the story that this person has to tell. Sometimes that is a story which the portayed doesn’t even know himself or believed to be long forgotten.
Working with collodion wet plate photography allows me to create an intense depth in portraits on many different levels, that I have not found in digital photography yet. Handling a large format camera as well as the more than 175 years old photographical procedure itself call for contemplativeness.
The images presented are a selection of collodion wet plates, that were created within the framework of the series „100 Wet Plates – 100 Words“.
A distincitive feature of this series is the personal comment of each portrayed person, which holds the spontaneous emotion that arises when they see their own portrait for the first time. Well worth mentioning is the fact, that with each person only one single wet plate was created. That allowed for intimate moments and formed those unique prtraits.
