Adrian Cook, an award-winning portrait and documentary photographer, has worked for major advertising agencies and magazines worldwide, but he found himself feeling uninspired by the predictability and monotony of digital photography.
Rather than looking to even newer technologies and developments for inspiration, Cook turned his attention to the past. He began taking photographs using wet plate collodion processes to recreate the aesthetic qualities and characteristics he feels have been lost with the demise of film.
Cook’s Te Aroha-based portrait studio and mobile darkroom, Tintype Central, specialises in this 19th-century method, which predates film photography. Each image is hand-crafted, producing an original “direct-positive” image on a sheet of glass or aluminium plate. It’s essentially an image made directly by exposure to light and developed without the use of a negative.
Using equipment and techniques developed during the 1850s, the photographic plates are individually coated and sensitised in the darkroom before being exposed and developed while they are wet. Once fixed, washed and dried, they are then coated in a gum Sandarac varnish that preserves and protects them for years.
For Cook’s subjects, it’s more like an experience rather than a photo shoot. He takes them through the whole process, which lasts about 45 minutes – all for one photo. Here he explains more about the process.
“I can go quicker but I generally give myself that time in case there’s a stuff up - in case on the rare occasion they blink, but it’s more likely me making a mistake where I’ll pour a bad plate or develop it badly. Or maybe they move, the focusing is very critical. When I focus them, I close my camera and I can’t see them or the plate, and if they move in that time, it will be out of focus.
To smile or not to smile
“The funny thing is people are more than welcome to smile with flash if they want to because it’s freezing their movement. But I’d say 99% of people don’t smile in my pictures. It’s not that they’re being grumpy, it’s just that they’re very quiet and they tend to want to be themselves. I find it to be a very true, honest picture of themselves. When their family sees the photo, they often say, ‘Oh that’s just you, being you’. They’re not trying to be ‘smiley, smiley’ for the camera.
“In the old days, they only had daylight so in all those old photographs, no one smiles. They’ve all got braces behind their head and they’re very upright so they don’t move, and they were all told not to smile because you can’t hold a smile for five seconds. In five seconds, even if you think you aren’t moving, you are moving a tiny fraction.
“Of those people who do decide to smile in my sessions, they’ve practised how they’re going to do it. I then leave them while I go and get the plate, and then when I come back after those 2 minutes, they’ve changed their mind. It’s like they’ve thought about it and decided to just be themselves.
Previously, I’ve had someone smile for me, and they asked to redo it so that they aren’t smiling. As for little children, in normal photos they’re always asked to smile – and they smile horribly! All baring their teeth - you know those pictures where it’s so forced? For the wet plate photos, even little kids don’t often seem to want to smile, and they really like the pictures.”
You created a series of pictures titled Mullets Matter, how did this come about?
“I noticed this Mullets Matter campaign last year which raised awareness for mental health. I got in touch with the Mental Health Foundation and asked how I could help. I was aware of ‘Movember’ where people grow a moustache, but Mullets Matter is anything: it’s little kids; it’s women; it’s young men; it can be anybody. So, I got in touch and asked whether I could help photograph in some way. Once the campaign had finished, they chose the top 15 people who had raised the most money and they all came to my studio for a day. People flew here from all around New Zealand, these young boys here are from Tokoroa. They all got put up for the night and had their picture taken. Then we auctioned them off, selling the plates to raise a bit more money. Pretty much everyone bought their own picture, but we also had a videographer come down to do a behind the scenes and interview all the mullet people.”
Were they all amped to have their photo taken?
“It’s a very different way of having your portrait taken, as I said. It’s very slow. You often get people who are quite shy about having their photo taken. When they see the picture, most people really like it. I’ve been shooting for 30 years, and I can get a similar look with digital but there’s something about their concentration in these pictures that makes it special.”
And the physical side to it, that’s quite different as well.
“That’s the other thing about wet plate, very few people print a picture out now. You only look at it on your phone or whatever device you’ve got. And then again, it depends on what size the device is. It’s quite a cold way of looking at images. To have something physical that you can hold in your hand and pass around to people is quite nice.
“Also, with tintype, its full of imperfections. There are probably bits of my dandruff in there and whatever’s floating around in the air - bits of dust. It’s not a perfectly flat image. The varnish too can leave a texture on top of it. So, to me, it’s a bit like a painting. When you hold it in your hand - that’s pure silver nitrate. You see how the silver reacts to the light and you see how it picks up an imperfection.
“You could shoot the same composition twice with no one moving and it would be a different photo.
“Both of these were shot on clear glass, but one has got tar on the back of it. When you shoot on clear glass, it’s slightly negative but when you put black behind it or you frame it, it turns into a positive. So, those are the same shots, just one has tar on the back and one doesn’t.
“The Darth Vader is also smaller than you think - it’s a model. When I was in Australia, I shared a studio with a tattoo artist who was a complete Star Wars nerd. His collection was amazing. He had R2-D2, he had a Lego thing of the spaceship, he’s got the gun Hans Solo used, he has everything! I would go in every now and then and pick something off his wall and photograph it. That Star Wars model is about 4 feet high but was amazingly made.
“One of the ways you can shoot a tin type is using something called ruby glass.
“I’ve used blue glass and green glass as well, but ruby glass is quite traditional. It is quite hard to find, so in sessions I often clear glass or aluminium.
“This apparent landscape was actually shot in a studio. I did this in lockdown when I was locked in my studio for about three months in Australia. And so, in that shot, I’ve used a bonsai tree. That tree is about 6 inches high, but probably about 50 years old.
“But some are shot on location - for that, I use my portable caravan. The problem with wet plate photography is that you must have a darkroom. It means I’m either confined to my studio or I must find a way to take my darkroom places. So, I take my caravan all over the country. I’ll go off for a weekend or a week and I’ll shoot landscapes, or I’ll go looking for faces. I’ll go to a pub for a night, and I’ll go in the bar and see who’s there. There’s usually an old guy drinking beer with his mate, and I’ll ask them to do a portrait the next day or night.
“The three girls in this image, I wasn’t sure who they were. I saw them walking back out of the water and I said, ‘I need you there just for my composition, please just stand there for a few minutes,’ and they did. Once I shot it, they came out and I got them to watch as I processed it. Their parents ended up buying the plate. In saying that, it’s quite hard because they’re all one-off. There are ones like this that I really love and then you sell it and it’s gone. I have the digital version, but I don’t have the actual plate. It’s nice that it’s gone somewhere though and that the family of the girls in the photo have it. It will last 200 years, so I guess it will become a bit of an heirloom.”