At 1,489 feet above sea level, Kirkstone is the highest point one can drive to in the Lake District, a place where the Cumbrian weather meets the raw face of geology. Wind, rain, and sudden shafts of light sweep across the fellside, turning the quarry’s slate-grey terraces into something almost mythic.
It was here, in a fit of what I can only describe as creative lunacy, that I chose to photograph Kirkstone Quarry, not with the convenience of digital precision, but with the alchemical tools of the 1850s: the collodion wet plate process.
Invented by Frederick Scott Archer, the collodion method briefly dominated mid-19th century photography before the advent of dry gelatin plates. It is a process of exquisite difficulty, each plate must be coated, sensitised, exposed, and developed within a quarter of an hour, while still wet. To work outdoors, a photographer needs to carry a portable darkroom and a chemist’s nerve for perfect solutions. On a quarry face, 1,200 feet up the Kirkstone Pass, it becomes an act of endurance and faith, an open-air experiment in patience, problem-solving, and luck. Lots of luck.
Everything conspires against you. The wind whips at your chemicals, dust settles on the plate, light shifts before exposure can be made. Temperatures plunge, hands freeze, the toxic chemicals stain everything. The whole thing is faintly ridiculous, but that ridiculousness is also its charm. The physical struggle gives the process a rhythm and a presence, every plate a battle, every success a small miracle wrested from circumstance.
And yet, despite, or perhaps because of, the chaos, something remarkable happened. The project became not just an exercise in image-making, but a shared experience, a form of collective theatre. The black tent of the darkroom flapping in the wind, the metal plates gleaming with ghostly images, that alchemy of the image appearing like an apparition in the chemistry. In capturing my sitters the processes also captivated them.
The collodion process itself imposes its own vision. Sensitive only to blue and ultraviolet light, it renders the world in unfamiliar hierarchies: cool tones flare bright, warm colours sink into shadow. Reds and yellows vanish; skies dissolve into white. The results are both alien and deeply human, the once familiar translated into a new visual language. The quarry face becomes sculptural, the skin of the workers luminous, their eyes burning with silver light. What emerges is a world stripped to its essentials.
When I look at those images now, I see not only the faces of the quarry workers but the entire choreography of their making: What began as an act of madness became a shared gesture, a collaboration between people, process, and place.
The collodion plate, in its shimmering imperfection, holds that memory. It is both document and elegy, record and performance, observation and participation. A fitting tribute to a magnificent place.
Photographed in 2010 with Carl Radford
