Strange alchemy

Amy Rockett-Todd’s archaic art of wet plate collodion photography

With her large format camera dubbed the Green Monster, coolers full of fuming, burping chemicals, and her husband and two kids in tow, Amy Rockett-Todd is “ready to go at any moment really,” she says.

Rockett-Todd is a Tulsa educator, designer, studio artist, and photographer who creates haunting imagery through an 1850s photographic technique called wet plate collodion process.

In her patchwork purse, Rockett-Todd keeps a Nutri-Grain bar, bills, and a cherry wood pinhole camera. It’s loaded. She is always ready to catch a collodion fairy, mythic among the collodion community, should one happen along.

Rockett-Todd says she catches a collodion fairy in maybe one of every 75 plates (images). She pulls up a photo on her Mac. 

“This is the fairytale to this process,” she says, pointing to a spray of silver across the top of a close-up of her husband’s face; his gray hair is doused all through with silver swirls. She pulls up another photo of her daughter in profile, pinpricks of silver are like a galaxy across her forehead. 

“They’re called collodion fairies. Sometimes they visit you and sometimes they won’t. If they don’t—” she clicks through her Mac again to show a technically perfect shot.

“But when they do, that’s when happy accidents occur,” she says of the swirls, the galaxy.

The effect is reason enough to fall in love with the archaic art of wet plate collodion photography, despite the potions of toxic chemicals and labor involved. The process has re-emerged in recent decades thanks to fine arts photographers and Civil War re-enactors alike, drawn to the Rorschach ink-blot, X-ray-feel of the images the technique produces.

No Instagram filter can emulate the hand-made process. 

“It sees light differently,” Rockett-Todd says. “I have one green eye and one blue eye. I can’t remember which is which. When I take a photo one eye turns white and the other turns grey.”

Yellow turns black; lemons turn to avocadoes.

Rockett-Todd began as a traditional pinhole photographer. 

“I love the slow-movement capture with pinhole, the long exposure,” she says. During her research on pinhole photos, she came across images with “all these swirls and this fluid motion and ambiance … there was something magical about it.”

Months later, she traveled 2,000 miles to a media workshop in Rockport, Maine, to explore the collodion process. She stayed for two weeks learning everything she could, then ordered all the processing chemicals involved. 

Soon, boxes labeled HAZMAT and FLAMMABLE LIQUID arrived on her doorstep and collected in a corner of the living room. 

“I ordered it all and it sat there for two or three months until my husband said, ‘Are you gonna do something with this?’

“I wouldn’t say it, but I was scared to start. I felt that once I opened a box it’s like, okay, you’re in it now.”

Once she finally opened the boxes, she got to work. 

“And I haven’t stopped.” 

Rockett-Todd’s new gallery showing at Hardesty Arts Center, MANUS (Latin for “hand”), explores the intersections of handmade art, technology, and architecture. 

The show’s centerpiece, “abundance,” is a unique look at the Abundant Life Building, Oral Roberts’ famed seven-story, windowless ministry headquarters, now abandoned. 

“I took pictures of the building’s details, the tiles, the shadows of the triangulations, the decay of the concrete,” she says. Then she hand-cut mirrors onto which she transposed images of words and architectural details, much of it hand-painted gold. Rockett-Todd encourages gallery-goers to take selfies in the diamond-cut mirrors and (literally) reflect on Tulsa’s architecture, our existence within them, and abandonment of them.

On May 6, Rockett-Todd will have all of her collodion-hunting supplies on hand for a demonstration from 2–4 p.m. at Hardesty Arts Center. Participants are encouraged to join her in the exhibition space to help build materials and objects that she will be photographing using a tintype photo set-up with her Green Monster, the lights, portable darkbox for developing, and all of her recipes ready to go. Participants can choose to have a photo of themselves in final tintype images. But stand still—if even a bit of your hands, arms or body moves during the 20-second exposure, you’ll be rendered an opaque ghost in the final image. 

MANUS runs through May 21 at Hardesty Arts Center, 101 E. Archer St.

For more from Jennie, read the latest edition of “Tell You What.”