Photography
One plate, no negative
Garry Hunter makes portraits the way they were made in 1851. The process is unforgiving, the sitter has to stay still, and nothing about the result can be undone afterwards.
Wet-plate collodion was invented by Frederick Scott Archer in 1851 and made obsolete within thirty years. It works like this: collodion is poured by hand across a plate of blackened tin or glass, the plate is sensitised in a silver nitrate bath, and it must be exposed and developed while still wet. The photographer has perhaps ten minutes from pouring to fixing. Miss the window and the plate is dead.
The exposure runs to several seconds, which is why Victorian sitters look so grave. It is difficult to hold an expression for that long and almost impossible to hold a false one. The process rewards stillness and punishes performance.
What comes off the plate is a single positive object. There is no negative, so there is no second print and nothing to retouch. The pour marks at the edges, the flaring in the corners, the small comets where the chemistry misbehaved: all of it stays. A modern eye reads those marks as a filter. They are the opposite. They are the evidence that a specific person stood in front of a specific camera on a specific afternoon and that someone made the thing by hand, once.
Garry Hunter is the artistic director of Fitzrovia Noir, the London arts collective formed in 2008 to record the closing of the Middlesex Hospital and since responsible for more than a hundred installations. The plates hang in the group's shows: Document, curated by Graham Carrick on a pontoon beneath the steamship SS Robin at Trinity Buoy Wharf in June 2025, and a salon-style exhibition for Photomonth in October 2026 at The King's Canary in Fitzrovia.
The sitting is the unusual part. The sitter waits while the plate is developed in a tray in front of them, and the image surfaces out of the dark in about fifteen seconds. Almost nobody who has watched it happen describes it as a photograph being taken. They describe it as something arriving.
Sources
Garry Hunter, Fitzrovia Noir · Fitzrovia Noir: 15 Years, Fitzrovia News