John Hoare’s relationship with photography began long before wet-plate collodion entered his life. Raised in the pre-digital era, he received a Kodak Instamatic for his ninth birthday. His father suggested cutting up the square prints that came back from the chemist and changing the aspect ratio to suit the subject: wide for bridges, tall for a photograph of his brother jumping in the air. That simple act of reframing stayed with him.
From there came black-and-white developing and printing in a school darkroom under the stairs. Decades later, after a career as a television and film cinematographer, Hoare found himself pulled toward another kind of photographic slowness.
Falling down the wet-plate rabbit hole
About ten years ago, while looking at nineteenth-century photographs online, Hoare came across a wet-plate portrait of a surfer. The apparent contradiction stopped him: the image looked historical, but the subject clearly was not. He discovered it was a contemporary photograph by Joni Sternbach and kept following the process from there.
“I was unconsciously drawn to ‘slow’ photography, in the same way music lovers embrace vinyl records.”
Wet plate changed the rhythm of portraiture. A single plate can take ten to fifteen minutes to prepare, expose and develop. That delay creates space. Hoare talks with the sitter, hears their story, and lets them watch the process unfold. The portrait becomes less about a rapid sequence of frames and more about the shared experience of making one image.
Control, chance and fingerprints
Technically, Hoare tries to control as much as possible. Wet plate has many possible points of failure: chemistry, contamination, acidity, temperature, exposure and markings that sometimes seem to have no obvious cause. Working from a small shed in his garden, he relies on a few lighting setups he knows well and processes that have proved dependable.
But complete control is never really available. That tension is part of the medium’s character. Asked how chemistry and materiality enter his visual language, Hoare answered with a line that says almost everything: “I don’t need to sign my plates… my fingerprints are all over them.”
One early portrait of Sophie Rivers became a breakthrough because it was the first time he felt both the lighting and chemistry had worked together exactly as he wanted. Since then, the process has continued to be a negotiation between craft and unpredictability.
The story and drama in a face
Hoare does not believe a historical process changes the fundamentals of a successful portrait. His work as a cinematographer means lighting and framing are already deeply familiar. What matters is still the same thing: finding the story and drama in a face, regardless of the camera.
“A good photographer is always seeking out the story and drama in a face regardless of what camera they are holding.”
At the moment, he is exploring two directions he feels wet plate suits naturally: the gothic and the erotic. Yet the physical object remains central. Holding a plate is satisfying precisely because it exists as something made, handled and preserved — even if Hoare is also comfortable with those plates living online as images.
For someone who has never experienced wet plate, his advice is simple: experience it. Find a local practitioner, sit for a portrait and watch the image appear. Technique explains part of the process, but the theatre of it — the waiting, the chemistry and the moment an image becomes visible — is something else entirely.
John Hoare’s wet-plate work · Instagram
Developing Stories is a Berlin Photo Studio editorial series about the people, memories and lives behind the photographs we encounter.
