Portrait Of...
Lincoln Green, Burmantofts & Mabgate
During May 2021, Lens Lab made portraits of the community in our neighbourhood. We wanted to make work rooted in the location of our studio, so we set up a series of pop-up street-based photo studios in community spaces, from shop fronts and roadside pavements to Lincoln Green Mosque on Eid.
We wanted to find ways to encourage the community to get involved, so we chose to use a variety of photographic techniques spanning the history of photography. This included using a Victorian-era Collodion wet plate process on an old, large-format camera, as well as a brand-new digital camera with an old lens.
The Collodion Wetplate process involves coating a 5x4” plate with wet chemistry (collodion & silver nitrate) and making an exposure. As the collodion has an ISO value of around one, the exposures can be quite long: 1-10 seconds outdoors, longer if indoors. The plates then needed to be developed in Lens Labs mobile darkroom (an old pram) before they dried out. Simple process, really.
These were then placed next to a beautiful, colour image shot on a brand-new DSLR. The contrast between the two images was fascinating, and we were impressed by the enthusiasm people showed in being involved. People loved being able to watch their wet plate portrait develop in the fixer tray, and then see their colour digital image on the back of the DSLR.
Portrait Of Lincoln Green, Mabgate & Burmantofts was funded by Leeds 2023.