This new whole-plate wet collodion negative feels less like a photograph and more like a question: what does it mean to hold presence and impermanence in the same breath? The man, the bottle, and the rocks: are they material, or are they ghosts caught in the alchemy of silver and collodion? The glass doesn’t just capture an image; it captures the residue of time passing. What remains when the moment is gone? What does the plate remember that we forget?
Collodion always reminds me that everything we try to fix eventually fades. The process is slow and ritualistic; it forces me into a state of attention. Light becomes a witness, not just a means. This plate, like so many I make, isn’t about nostalgia; it’s about the impossibility of permanence. It’s about standing inside the paradox that Becker, Rank, and Yalom each described in their own way: to create in the face of death is both defiance and surrender.
In that sense, this image is elegiac. The man’s presence feels temporary, the bottle reflective, and the rocks ancient and indifferent. Together they form a kind of visual equation, human transience measured against geological time. The silver surface, with its imperfections and streaks, becomes a metaphor for the self: luminous, decaying, still reaching toward meaning.