Artist Statement

The Soldier Portraits series consists of unique, collodion positives produced on glass and aluminum plates and archival pigment prints derived from these plates. The wet collodion process was the primary photographic method from the 1850s through the 1880s, encompassing with the dates of the American Civil War. The people photographed are soldiers of the U.S. Army based in Southeast Georgia. The majority of them have deployed to Iraq one to four times since 2003. Many are in Iraq or Afghanistan now. Others expect to deploy soon.

This work is a result of my relocation to Savannah, Georgia, which is near two major army installations.I started seeing soldiers in uniform at the grocery store, the gas station, everywhere. I'd never really given soldiers much thought, because I rarely encountered them. I began to read in the local newspaper that many members of the local division were being deployed to Iraq for the third and fourth times. Looking into the impossibly fresh, young face of the uniformed kid in front of me at Home Depot and connecting that face to what happens in Iraq was a big shift for me in the way I thought about soldiers.

The necessarily long exposures of this slow process often result in an intensity of gaze that asks the viewer to look longer, and the grainless, highly detailed surface brings out minute details of each individual. Because the direct positive produces a reversed image, a viewer may also consider the concept of themselves "mirrored" by a soldier. And the military history of the process - the vast majority of civil war images were made with this technique - brings up other considerations. The appearance reflects back on our cultural memory of images of war.

Thousands of wet collodion plates - ambrotypes on glass and tintypes on metal - from the civil war era survive today. It is one of the most archival of the photographic processes. The inherent flaws that appear on the plates of this very hands-on technique also serve to remind us that the object (plate) being viewed was in the room with the subject and handled by the photographer at the time of the exposure.

In the end, I wanted to produce physically enduring, emotionally arresting images of people who are being sent repeatedly into war zones.