Once the photograph is taken, the plates can only be handled in darkness. I have to therefore coat each plate by hand before each photograph. The coated photoplate needs to still be wet for the developing process, which means I have about ten to fifteen minutes from coating the plate until developing it. The most challenging thing involves the developing, in that I have to do it immediately. What specific challenges did you face when taking your camera out into the forest? When you first showed me the technique in the studio, it seemed almost impossible you could take it outside. These are voids to be filled by the viewerвЂ™s imagination. The photos are blurred the images look liquid, creating blind spots. And then, what I find most intriguing about the collodion wet plate process, are the imperfections of the images. What is it about this technique that is so appealing to you as a photographer?ДЇirst, I love analogue photography in general. What follows is my short interview with Eymelt, about the photography in our book and what sheвЂ™s planning next. To celebrate the launch of the book this autumn I wanted to celebrate EymeltвЂ™s talent and her art. EymeltвЂ™s art both illustrates the text and inspires it, and I know I would have created something different, something lesser, without our collaboration. Some of the images she returned to inspired new stories in turn. Some of the stories contained within the book gave Eymelt inspiration when she took her mobile darkroom into the forest. It is my novella, a whole-life story told through fragments about a narratorвЂ™s relationship to the forest, sharing the pages with EymeltвЂ™s photographs from between the trees. In the Pines is a combination of words and images. The idea of finding a way to take the collodion wet plate technique out of the studio and into the landscape was the starting point for what would become our new book. In early 2017, Eymelt had made a short film based on my book Ghosts on Shore about the Baltic coast, and we had been keen to work together on a project again. вЂDid you ever try this outside?вЂ™ someone asked, and in those six words, an idea was born.

We spent a few happy hours in her studio room, laughing and joking and mainly talking to EymeltвЂ™s legs, because she was usually under a thick blanket of some short, either behind the camera or in her self-made dark room where she prepared the collodion emulsion, coating the plates and then developing them by hand. The collodion wet plate process requires that a black tin plate be coated, sensitized, exposed and developed in the space of about fifteen minutes. We would вЂ“ in this era of mobile phones and Instagram, when more photographs are taken in a single year than in the previous century вЂ“ have to be patient. It would take a while, she said, to capture each image. She had been looking for models, people she could photograph using a technique that dates back to the earliest days of photography. It was a cold winter day when Eymelt invited us to her studio in Berlin-WeiГџensee.

Babushka journey to the savage planet