Old Glass Insulators — Whole Plate, November 1, 2025

It’s so good to be back! It’s like riding a bicycle!

This is my first time making wet collodion images in New Mexican light. The air here feels different, drier, sharper, almost sentient in the way it bends light and shadow. The light is amazing. It’s “soft.” Much softer than the high UV light of the Colorado mountains.

The process felt both foreign and familiar. I missed the smell of ether, the sticky residue of collodion on my hands, and the small miracle of seeing the image appear in the developer. It’s not nostalgia; it’s recognition. The darkroom remains a place where time collapses.

The image I made today is of old glass insulators, remnants of a different kind of transmission. I found them half-buried in the desert dirt, relics of a vanished network that once carried voices and voltage across the American landscape. Some were shot through and fractured; one, improbably, remained whole. Its blue glass caught the morning light like a memory refusing to die.

The scene in digits.

I was drawn to these objects for their contradictions. They were built to endure, yet they shatter easily. They once conducted invisible currents, and now they are silent. They hold the history of connection and the inevitability of disconnection. Photographing them felt like standing between those two poles—between what holds and what breaks.

The glass, like the psyche, records every impact. The fractures become part of its character. In that way, the act of photographing them became a meditation on survival—how the self transmits meaning even after being cracked by experience. The blue insulator, intact among the ruins, felt like a metaphor for what remains transmissible in me: the impulse to create, to reach across distance, and to make contact through image and light.

Working with glass has always been more than a process; it’s a kind of ceremony. Each plate is a conversation with chemistry, a slow revelation of what wants to appear. Collodion teaches humility; silver sees everything. It reacts to the smallest impurity, just as the psyche reacts to what it resists. There’s a kind of grace in that sensitivity.

Holding the plate, watching the image emerge, I felt the familiar sense of presence that only this process offers. It’s not just about recording an object—it’s about witnessing transformation. The photograph becomes a transmission, a signal from matter to mind, from the visible to the invisible.

In the end, the plate is both image and mirror. It reflects what I brought into the room: a desire to reconnect with process, with light, and with myself. The broken insulators remind me that communication is never perfect, that art itself is a fragile conduit. But sometimes, even after the line is cut, the current finds its way through.

Whole Plate placeholder.

Some of my chemistry and supply shelves are up and full. I’m still making small changes and arrangements to my darkroom, but I really like it—very comfortable to work in and very spacious!

Our Struggle To Be Unique

Ernest Becker said, when talking about being unique, “it expresses the heart of the creature: the desire to stand out, to be the one in creation. When you combine natural narcissism with the basic need for self-esteem, you create a creature who has to feel himself an object of primary value: first in the universe, representing in himself all of life.” Simply put, we want attention and adoration. We will go to great lengths to get it, and sometimes it manifests as narcissism. It's everywhere in society, especially with social media. It’s given us a clear example of this behavior (and need). Posting an endless stream of "selfies" and showing the "ideal lifestyle"—travel, wealth, high-end material goods, famous friends, popularity, etc.

I know that most people never think about their struggle for self-esteem (to find meaning and significance); not consciously anyway. It’s a daily battle for most human beings. This drives most human behavior after the basic needs are met, and most people don’t even know it.

If you look at Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, you’ll find what human beings spend their time doing every day. The basic requirements include physiological and safety needs. We need to breathe, eat, sleep, have shelter, safety, etc. These show the first survival drives, which include reproduction. Becker would call these "animal needs." Like all other animals, we are not exempt when it comes to the basic survival and reproduction drives. This is, in fact, what collides with our knowledge of death and creates the anxiety that we repress through self-esteem and culture.

“It is quite true that man lives by bread alone — when there is no bread. But what happens to man’s desires when there is plenty of bread and when his belly is chronically filled? At once other (and “higher”) needs emerge and these, rather than physiological hungers, dominate the organism. And when these in turn are satisfied, again new (and still “higher”) needs emerge and so on. This is what we mean by saying that the basic human needs are organized into a hierarchy of relative prepotency.”

— (Maslow, 1943, p. 375)

As you climb up the Maslow ladder, you see where this changes. I like Maslow’s theory. And for the most part, I agree with it. Where I would differ is how these are separated. Love and belonging, self-esteem, and self-actualization can all be put into one category: self-esteem. We can never really attain self-actualization. This is a goal set in this theory to strive toward (the carrot on the stick). Self-actualization gives you a way to look for and get a steady supply of self-esteem. Becker calls this "culture" or "cultural worldview."

Culture provides a way we can bolster and maintain our self-esteem, and self-esteem keeps our existential terror (death anxiety) at bay. Self-esteem buffers anxiety. “Psychological equanimity also requires that individuals perceive themselves as persons of value in a world of meaning. This is accomplished through social roles with associated standards. Self-esteem is the sense of personal significance that results from meeting or exceeding such standards.” (The Ernest Becker Foundation)

“I was no longer needing to be special, because I was no longer so caught in my puny separateness that had to keep proving I was something. I was part of the universe, like a tree is, or like grass is, or like water is. Like storms, like roses. I was just part of it all.”

— Ram Dass, Changing Lenses

From here, we can understand the need for self-esteem. We have to have it; if we don’t, psychological pathologies, namely depression, will emerge. The question becomes one of balance. How do we balance our need for self-esteem and yet keep narcissism at bay? Bolstering self-esteem and narcissism are sometimes very difficult to tell apart.

Once we have self-esteem (meaning and significance), we can operate day-to-day with what most would call "normalcy." Our self-esteem comes from our culture, which is a shared reality that tells us what to believe and how to act to boost our self-esteem. When this cultural worldview is threatened or questioned, we get angry and go to great lengths to defend it. And the deeper we believe or cling to our worldview, the more extreme our response to a threat will be. Herein lies the problem. This is the crux of my project.

“Half of the harm that is done in this world is due to people who want to feel important...they do not mean to do harm...they are absorbed in their endless struggle to think well of themselves.”

— T. S. Eliot

Winter Activities: Reading, Writing, and Research

It’s really exciting for me to be able to find connections between psychology, anthropology, philosophy, and my work. I dig deep for them, but when I find them, it’s like a big, bright light illuminating my way. To blend the social sciences and art seems like a stretch, but you’d be surprised how related and relevant it is. It fits well together in the right context.

Reading, writing, and research are what I’m mostly doing over the winter. I will make a few images, but I live in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado, and at almost 9,000 feet above sea level, it gets cold and snowy here. However, we do have some really nice sunny days in between the storms. I’ll try to take advantage of those when I can.

Most of my day is spent writing the text for my book and laying out the chapters for it. I can see it’s going to be a big job organizing the writing. Right now, I have a rough draft of what the direction will be, and I have most of the introduction written. I continue to edit and rewrite my artist’s statement, too. As the project evolves and becomes clearer, I can articulate the main points better. I have a lot of the psychology and philosophical anthropology written. The organization of that will be the big challenge. I don’t want the book to be a non-pharmacological intervention for insomnia. I want it to be easily consumed and understood. A big challenge for sure, but I’m up to it and very excited to do it.

The book, right now, looks like this:
Foreword
Chapter 1: Artist’s Statement
Chapter 2: Introduction
Chapter 3: Death Anxiety
Chapter 4: Terror Management Theory
Chapter 5: The Photographs
Chapter 6: Essays
Afterword

I’m reading and re-reading these books over the winter. These books have taught me so much about psychology, anthropology, and philosophy. They make up the vast majority of references for my book. I highly recommend reading them if you haven’t.

Checking Density (Dmax/Dmin) On Wet Collodion Negatives

The Wet Collodion Negative - varnished and ready to run some test prints on Platinum Palladium and Rawlins Oil!

The Equation
Dmax: The area with the most density with detail.
Dmin: The area with the least amount of density with detail.
Subtract the Dmin from the Dmax and that is your NEGATIVE DENSITY.

The Print
If you want to maximize the quality of a print, you need to know what the Dmax/Dmin, or density of your negative is - maximum density (with detail), where the most silver is deposited. This is the brightest or highlight area(s). The thinnest part with detail is your Dmin area - approaching the void area or shadow(s). And everything else in between is the middle tones or middle values.

Why is it important? Not every negative will print well on every POP (Printing Out Process) or DOP (Developing Out Process). Some require density in the 2.0+ range - like Salt Paper. And some require less density. If you fail to match the negative with the process, it will never be as good of a print as possible if it were matched up.

In my opinion, you should choose a printing process and make negatives exclusively for that process. I’m not saying you can’t print a “Salt Negative” on Colodio-Chloride paper, you can. What I’m saying is that it will never be as good as a Salt print and vice versus.

My plans for this project are two types of prints. Both are “non-silver” and one is a pigment process. They are Platinum Palladium (mostly Palladium) and Rawlins Oil prints. I’ve made many Rawlins Oil prints and know that good negatives are almost identical to the Platinum Palladium process. The density of 1.50 - 1.80 is perfect. I can get great prints all the way to 2.0.

What happens if you don’t get the proper exposure or development on the negative? What can you do? Rarely are you too dense; I’m not talking about over-exposure, but getting in the density of 2.0+ with a foundation negative, or a negative straight out the camera. Most of the time they will be a bit under the desired density for technical reasons (fogging the shadow areas). If you need more density, you can do that chemically with pyrogallic acid and citric acid plus a bit of silver nitrate. This is called redevelopment and you can take it as far as you desire regarding density. Problem solved.

The Negative
Today, I varnished and prepared my test plate for my first run of the Platinum Palladium process and Rawlins Oil process. I checked the Dmax and found that where the light was hitting the back of the stump, my highlights, with details, ranging from 1.75 to 1.80. And the areas with the thinnest silver (some weeds in the foreground) that still had detail registered as 0.20 - that means if I subtract the Dmin from the Dmax I have a density of 1.59 - or thereabout. This should be a perfect negative for the processes. I’ll soon find out!