I’m a third generation New Yorker, third generation photographer and fourth generation painter. I live in my grandfather's old suite at the Whitby Hotel in Times Square. In my bedroom there are 50,000+ photographs from the 1910s-1990s and 200 film reels my grandfather shot of tribes living in the Amazon and dozens of cameras he left behind. Surprised the floor hasn't collapsed under the weight; I'm slowly adding my own photographs to the collection.
Currently I am shooting on a 150 year old 11x14" studio camera that has been custom modified to shoot large format 5x7" and ultra large format 14x14" square portraits. Using the wet plate collodion photographic process I make my own film with my own chemistry from scratch. I typically do not make prints, presenting the original tin plate as the final, one-of-a-kind image.
Photography is a process for me in addition to a tangible end product. The medium is an experiential, physical and chemical transmutation of materials and light into an image indelibly marked in it’s component parts. Rather than get lost in some abandoned hard drive, a century or more from now these photographic plates will still exist, tangible and real, ready for my descendants to discover in a box somewhere.
