Ian Ruhter makes photographs with a large
camera. A very large camera. His camera is so large that it is essentially the
rear end of a big blue cargo van, which at least means transportation is built
in.
He’s using the
wet collodion process
which amongst other things means pouring noxious chemicals over the
plates in the field. The introduction to his
short documentary shows some of
this process in a deliciously misleading way, and has a fair bit of footage of
the plate preparation and shooting processes.
The plates themselves, which in this process also carry the final image, are
large sheets of metal. I thought I was stretching things a bit when I worked
with 5x4 inch negatives: one of Ruhter’s standard plate sizes seems to be 5x4
feet.
If you’ve never seen large images from a direct imaging process like this, it’s
tempting to regard this as a bit of a gimmick, or at best just a way of making a
really large photographic print. That’s not what you experience when you stand
in front of something like a
20”x24” Polaroid. Photographs like
this have a physical presence; it’s immediately clear that they are, to
paraphrase what Ruhter says in the film, not enlargements and not copies, but
original and unique objects.
I’m really glad there are still people in the world crazy enough to do this kind
of thing.