Dahlia #1

From the Flora Around Me collection.
Ambrotype 19th Century Photographic process
Plate: 203mm x 254mm
Frame: 284mm x 233mm x 35mm

Flora Around Me is drawn from the flowers Cotteret encounters in daily life, on walks through national parks, around the neighbourhood, or shared by friends. 
This is a collection rather than a series. The pieces aren’t bound together by one story, each ambrotype stands as its own intimate encounter.

The work arises from a deliberate practice in the studio, taking time to consider how to capture the plants and how the collodion process will render them. Working with wet plate collodion is always a wonder, it reveals the subject in a spectrum of light that differs from human vision, offering a perspective both familiar and surprising.

On the Ambrotype Process, the works in Flora Around Me are created using the wet plate collodion process, a photographic technique originating in the mid nineteenth century. Each Ambrotype is made by hand on a sheet of glass coated with collodion and sensitised in silver nitrate. The plate must be exposed and developed while still wet, requiring immediacy and precision. The resulting image is a light negative that reveals itself as a positive against a dark background. There is no intermediary negative and no possibility of reproduction. Each ambrotype is therefore a unique photographic object.

Variations in chemistry, light, exposure and timing leave subtle marks unique to each plate and to its making. These are not imperfections, but evidence of a living process, of the hand that made it and of the moment of its creation.

The materials and method are highly archival, these silver based images, once varnished, can last for generations, preserving the ephemeral beauty of the flowers long after their season has passed.