We live in an age of renting everything.
We buy books we don’t hold. We pay monthly for films we’ll never truly have. We freeze moments on our phones — thousands of them — and yet somehow those memories feel further away than ever. Stored in a cloud. Dependent on a subscription. Gone when the server goes, or when we simply stop paying.
I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately. And it led me somewhere unexpected: a 19th-century darkroom process called wet plate collodion.
Tintype photography was invented in the 1850s. You coat a metal plate with collodion — a viscous chemical solution — sensitise it, expose it in-camera, and develop it by hand, all within minutes. There is no digital file. There is no RAW backup. There is only the plate.
What you end up with is more than an object. A portrait poured from chemistry and light, fixed into metal. Something you can hold, pass around, put in a drawer, and find again in fifty years. It doesn’t need electricity. It doesn’t need a password. A perfect present for someone special.
I’ve just started. My first plates are imperfect — streaky, uneven, honest. I’m learning the chemistry, the timing, the particular stubbornness of collodion. It’s slow in a way that digital photography simply isn’t. Every exposure is a commitment.
But that’s exactly the point.
In a world that optimises for convenience and volume, there’s something quietly radical about a process that insists on presence. You cannot batch-edit tintypes. You cannot shoot and scroll. You are there, in the moment, with your hands in the chemistry, making one thing at a time — and that thing belongs entirely to whoever holds it.
I’m exploring wet plate collodion alongside my work as a photographer and visual storyteller. It won’t replace anything. But it will add something that digital cannot: the weight of a real object, the irreversibility of a single exposure, and the particular satisfaction of a memory you can actually keep.
If you’re curious about commissioning a tintype portrait, or just want to follow along as I figure out what I’m doing, get in touch.