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!
