Anthony Porcaro’s photographs begin with a contradiction. He constructs scenes that are deliberately artificial—miniatures, digital composites, impossible spaces—and then records them with wet-plate collodion, a process whose streaks, bubbles and chemical distortions are commonly read as evidence of photographic authenticity.
The result is not an attempt to hide fabrication. It is a way of asking why certain physical traces make us trust an image, and what happens when a historical process associated with truth is used to photograph something that never existed.
Learning that photography is chemistry
Porcaro first connected deeply with photography in college. A darkroom course and a first project making photograms made the medium suddenly physical: an analogue image was not simply a picture, but a chemical representation of light and time. Later, while studying in Florence, he encountered cyanotype, salted-paper printing and albumen printing. Historical processes became a way to connect photography to place, subject and history at the same time.
That relationship now extends beyond his own studio practice. As an artist and educator, Porcaro sees older photographic knowledge as something vulnerable. Wet-plate collodion, in particular, depends on practitioners continuing to use it, teach it and pass it on. Preserving the process is therefore part of the work itself.
The image as a contradictory object
Observation and the artifice of contemporary images recur throughout Porcaro’s work. He is interested in being watched: by audiences, by social-media systems, by algorithms, and by the implied viewer inside the image. Works such as Sky Box, Viewer and the Autorefractor series turn that anxiety into constructed environments.
The scenes can take weeks or months to build. Wallpaper, furniture, room layouts and small decorative objects are chosen to reinforce the central idea. In that sense, making a photograph often resembles drawing, painting or set design more than snapshot photography. The long construction period also binds each image to a particular period of Porcaro’s life.
Why “Viewer” changed the work
Viewer marked a shift. Before it, Porcaro often created realistic scenes as digital photomontages, printed them and then rephotographed them on wet plate. The chemical surface introduced distortions that functioned as markers of authenticity.
Building the environments physically changed the possibilities. Wet plate can record immense detail, and miniature sets gave that detail somewhere to live. The fictional spaces became more tangible, deeper and more convincing. They also allowed the process behind the image to become visible in exhibitions, where viewers could encounter both the photograph and the labour involved in building the set.
Imperfection as proof
For Porcaro, the distortions of wet-plate collodion are not flaws to remove. They are central to the meaning of the work. A bubble, streak or uneven edge records that chemistry and physics actually happened in front of the camera. That physical evidence gives his fabricated scenes a kind of material credibility that a clean digital file would not provide.
This is where the tension becomes productive: fantastical scenes are translated through a process historically connected to objective truth. The photograph becomes both fiction and evidence.
Teaching experimentation
Teaching also keeps Porcaro’s own practice moving. He encourages students to experiment because a photographic voice is often discovered through trying unfamiliar processes rather than repeating what already works. He applies the same logic to himself. Recent experiments with double exposure on wet plate opened another way of telling stories inside a medium whose tight timing makes such techniques difficult.
His current interest in autorefractor images extends the theme of observation. In an optometrist’s machine, a patient looks at a calming central image while the machine examines the eye looking back. Porcaro is combining that idea with stereoscopic photography and wet-plate double exposures: an image about seeing, being seen and the apparatus between the two.
Looking closely
Porcaro’s work asks for time because it was made with time. The scenes are layered slowly, and their details carry references to art history, previous works, observation and memory. Nothing is accidental simply because the final image appears surreal.
The invitation is therefore simple: look closely. Beneath the chemistry is a constructed world; beneath the construction is a question about what we believe when a photograph looks authentic.
Developing Stories is a Berlin Photo Studio editorial series about the people, memories and lives behind the film and photographic processes we encounter.
