A Salt Print From Another Life

I printed this 4x5 salt print today from a negative I made back in 2009, when I was living in Germany. Pulling an old plate like this into the present is always a strange experience. It’s like opening a time capsule you didn’t realize you buried. The negative was unvarnished—intentionally, because I wanted to see how far the elements had carried it over sixteen years. The result is this distressed, fractured surface that feels less like damage and more like memory asserting itself.

The subject is a simple setup: a cigar-box guitar propped on an old chair, a yarmulke (I got in Budapest) hanging beside it. At the time, I was thinking about the way ordinary objects can hold the weight of identity and belonging. Today, the print reads differently. The salt process softened everything, pulled it into an older register. The marks, flaws, and chemical bruises add a gravity the original plate didn’t have. It’s as if the print has aged along with me, and it’s finally showing its own scars.

Salt prints have a way of whispering rather than shouting. They blur the line (no pun) between what’s depicted and what’s remembered. This one carries the ghosts of two moments: who I was in 2009, exploring Europe with a camera and too many questions, and who I am now, printing in the desert, working at the intersection of creativity and mortality. These processes keep teaching me that nothing stays untouched—not glass plates, not bodies, not beliefs. Everything changes.

What I love most about this print is that it feels like a conversation between past and present versions of myself. A reminder that every piece of work we make continues living long after we think we’ve finished with it.

Impermanence and Insignificance: A Brief Note from the Void

I’ve been sitting with Escape from Evil again, and every time I revisit Becker’s later work, I feel the same jolt. He names the thing we spend our lives circling. Not death, exactly, but the quieter dread underneath it, the fear of slipping through this world without leaving so much as a fingerprint. Impermanence on one side. Insignificance on the other. It’s a tight little vise. And it’s psychologically terrifying.

Becker saw our terror clearly: we are symbolic creatures who can imagine infinity, yet we’re trapped in these fragile, temporary bodies that can vanish in a moment. The universe isn’t just big. It’s indifferent. And in that indifference, we feel an echo of our own smallness.

“The real fear isn’t the moment of dying. It’s the reckoning that follows: what does our ending reveal about how we lived?”

— Quinn Jacobson

Most of us respond by building what Becker called “immortality projects”—the long list of things we hope will grant us some kind of permanence (like what I’m doing right now). Careers. Families. Beliefs. A reputation. A legacy. Art. Even the small rituals of daily life can start to feel like talismans against oblivion. Becker never mocked these efforts. He understood their necessity. Without them, we’d drown in the sheer scale of our vulnerability.

For me, that tension shows up every time I work. Photography, especially the old processes I use, makes this dance impossible to ignore. A wet collodion plate holds everything and nothing at once. Light settles on silver and forms an image that can last centuries, yet the plate itself is so delicate you can wipe it clean with a rag or crack it between two fingers. It’s the same paradox Becker lived in: durability wrapped in impermanence.

And honestly, that’s why I keep returning to these ancient materials. They tell the truth gently. They remind me that nothing I make will rescue me from the limits of being human. But the making still matters. Maybe that’s the part Becker understood so well: our projects don’t need to defeat insignificance; they only need to give us a way to live with it.

Impermanence isn’t the enemy. Insignificance isn’t a verdict. They’re conditions. The water we swim in, if you will.

What we create—our art, our relationships, our gestures of care—won’t make us immortal. But they mark our brief time here with intention rather than avoidance. They let us stand, for a moment, in the truth of our smallness and still say: I was here. I noticed. I tried.

That might be enough.

Living Truthfully Inside Impermanence

Rupture is not simply a wound; it’s the generative moment when denial collapses and creation begins. It’s the place where death anxiety, cultural myth, and personal memory are transmuted into presence. Within rupture, the artist becomes a witness rather than a defender, turning from the fantasy of permanence toward the truth of impermanence. In that shift, art no longer seeks to outlive death; it becomes a form of living with it.

Otto Rank’s distinction between the artist and the neurotic illuminates this process. Both encounter rupture, the psychic shattering that comes when one’s symbolic world no longer holds, but only the artist metabolizes it. Where the neurotic internalizes and chokes on anxiety, the artist transforms it into form. The creative act becomes a means of surviving truth, of remaking coherence in the face of its undoing. Ernest Becker described culture as a shield against mortality; I see art as the moment that shield cracks. The fracture is not failure but revelation, an aperture where something honest can enter.

My work with wet collodion lives inside that aperture. The process itself enacts rupture: collodion, glass, silver, and time. Each plate holds the risk of loss. The collodion might peel, the image might fog, and the light might fail. Yet those failures become evidence of life. The surface bears the marks of both fragility and endurance, transparency and strength. Each plate is a negotiation between control and surrender, between the impulse to preserve and the inevitability of decay. To work in this way is to accept that every act of making is also an act of unmaking. I’m connecting deeply to these ideas and am excited to see where it takes me.

Gold Toned Waxed Salt Print From a Wet Collodion Negative

10" x 8" Gold Toned/Waxed Salt Print from a Wet Plate Collodion Negative
Because of the finish on the print, this didn't photograph very well (too much contrast). But you can get the idea. I "cooked" the print a little too long, too. I usually have a problem with not exposing long enough (printing out), but these print out pretty fast and I'm using my BLBs.

This was made with artificial light - 2 minutes 45 second exposure and I used an iodine/pyro re-development on the negative.

Whole Plate Collodion Negatives

Whole Plate Wet Collodion Negative - August 2009, Viernheim, Germany
Whole Plate Wet Collodion Negative - August 2009, Viernheim, Germany - (the streak is from "lens flare")
Wet Collodion Negatives are intense and a lot of fun. They take some pratice and there's no "high-wow" factor for the public, but they are really special for personal work and for POP (Albumen prints/Salt prints) prints.