Watch a video of me in action on the streets of New York City:
http://bit.ly/jb-wetplate (copy & paste this link into your browser)

When I signed up for a high class photography class in an effort to fulfill a curriculum requirement, I had no idea I would fall in love with the medium. And it would have been impossible for me to predict that what I viewed as a throw-away class would be the first step in my now 20-year career as a music photographer.

Photography quickly captured my heart and my imagination. I daydreamed about making a living as a fine art street photographer. I immersed myself completely into my new craft, and the only thing that could take my attention away from it - even for a moment - was my passion for the local music scene exploding all around me. It didn’t take long for me to realize that the best way to find fulfillment in photography was to shift my focus onto combining my love for photography with my love for music.

I spent the next 20 years shooting music - all kinds - from my high school friends’ bands in basements and local American Legion halls to rock icons in sold-out arena shows; from the pages of ‘zines and 7” vinyl art in the early 90s to magazine and album covers in more recent years.

It’s been a good run, an unbelievably exciting experience, but the last couple years left me longing for more - something to challenge me and bring me back to my roots of a newbie teenage photographer dreaming of making a living from my “art”.

It’s been about a year since I discovered the process of wet plate photography. Wet plate is a completely handmade process with origins dating back to the 1850s. Metal or glass plate negatives are sensitized, exposed, and developed all on-site using a portable dark room.

As soon as I developed my first plate, it was like a fire was reignited in my soul. I had traveled back in time, 20 years, and was suddenly my teenage self standing in my high school darkroom. I was falling in love with photography all over again.

Almost immediately after that first experience with wet plate, I found myself dragging my large format camera and self-constructed wooden darkroom through the gutters of NYC, painstakingly making handmade images in the streets. As a result, all the dust, grit, and chaotic, raw soul of the city are absorbed into my plates.

This process is so wonderfully beautiful and poetic to me. Each plate tells its own story, revealing an undeniable history and its own unique texture.

In a time marked - stained - by instant digital gratification and expression, this process slows life down. It slows me down. It humbles me. It inspires me to delve deeper, to explore further. It has reconnected me with my native New York and opened my eyes to the beauty of the changing (and disappearing) city I called home for most of my life.

And even though I’ve been humbled by the demands of the process of wet plate photography, I take great pride in what I’ve been able to create in this short amount of time. From the equipment I’ve built to the images that have developed on my plates, I know I’m creating a space for myself and my art in the long history of this craft… And I’m looking forward to sharing what I’ve discovered with the world.