Adrian Lee is a full-time wet-plate photographer based in Greenwich, London. Before collodion, he had spent years working with film and Rolleiflex cameras, drawn to medium format, mechanical cameras and the darkroom’s sense of alchemy. Then he saw his first wet-plate collodion image.
The texture, silver, shallow depth of field and strange ability of the camera to feel like a time machine were enough. His response was immediate: he did not fully understand what the process was, but he knew he wanted to do it.
“Part art, part craft, part history, part science.”
An obsession with benefits
What keeps Lee inside the process is precisely its difficulty. Wet plate is a continuous education. Chemistry changes, conditions shift, plates fail, and a successful image has to be built from scratch. When everything works, the result is not only a photograph but a physical object made through a sequence of deliberate actions.
That physicality also changes the experience for the sitter. People see the image being made and leave with a varnished portrait that can survive for generations. Lee enjoys considered studio work, but he also likes fast, accessible pop-up portrait booths at festivals and public events, connecting contemporary sitters with the itinerant tintype tradition.
Six minutes, many variables
A plate begins long before exposure. Silver nitrate has to be maintained, filtered and kept at the right density and acidity. Developer, fixer and varnish are prepared. The plate is poured with collodion, sensitized in a silver bath, loaded under red light and placed into a large-format camera.
Lee often works with old Petzval and Heliar lenses. Because wet plate has extremely low sensitivity, the process asks for fast lenses and precise focus. The exposure itself can be as simple as removing the lens cap. Then comes development, rinsing and fixing — the moment when the image emerges visibly on the plate.
That reveal is still emotional for Lee. Even after repetition, the image appearing from the fixer retains something uncanny.
Chance, failure and character
Wet plate contains more uncertainty than most modern photographic systems. Light, chemistry, temperature, cleanliness and location can all alter the result. Lee tries to understand which imperfections destroy an image and which ones give it character.
On an industrial stretch of the Thames, messily poured plates unexpectedly matched the battered environment so well that they looked as though they had been dredged up after a century. Other imperfections are intentionally encouraged: messy plate edges or the swirl of a short Petzval lens.
“The making is as important as the result.”
Failed plates have taught him not to treat problems as interruptions but as part of the medium. Wet plate demands troubleshooting, patience and a willingness to lose work — sometimes even at the final varnishing stage.
Back toward Norfolk
After thirty years in London, Lee is beginning to think about returning photographically to the farming county of Norfolk, where he grew up. The process that once pulled him toward photographic history may now become a way of looking again at a landscape and community that are personally familiar.
For Lee, wet plate is not a historical costume. His influences move across periods — Victorian photography, Hollywood portraiture, Avedon, film noir — without needing to declare the pictures either old or new. The continuity lies in the act of making: chemistry, light, craft, collaboration and the physical plate left behind.
Developing Stories is a Berlin Photo Studio editorial series about the people, memories and lives behind the photographs we encounter.
