Florida Memory is administered by the Florida Department of State, Division of Library and Information Services, Bureau of Archives and Records Management. The digitized records on Florida Memory come from the collections of the State Archives of Florida and the special collections of the State Library of Florida.
State Archives of Florida
- ArchivesFlorida.com
- State Archives Online Catalog
- ArchivesFlorida.com
- ArchivesFlorida.com
State Library of Florida
Related Sites
Listen: The Assorted Selections ProgramWet Collodion Photography
- Wet collodion plates are glass smeared with a wet chemical mixture.
- An ambrotype image is a faint negative, so it requires a dark background in order to make out the details. Without the dark background, the image is not easy to see.
- Photographers brought all necessary equipment and chemicals with them into the field.
History
After the introduction of the daguerreotype, inventors all over the world began working on photographic processes that were easier to make and reproducible. In 1851, an English sculptor named Frederick Scott Archer created what he called the wet collodion process, a new method for photography that became the leading edge of photo technology until about 1880. Collodion was an emulsion of photosensitive chemicals which could be applied to a variety of bases. The most common form was the ambrotype, also known as a “glass daguerreotype.”
Wet collodion is so named because the necessary chemicals had to be poured or smeared on a glass plate immediately prior to exposing the photograph. This was a major drawback of the process; photographs had to be prepared, exposed, developed and fixed before the collodion could dry. Nevertheless, the quality of images produced in this way far surpassed prior methods and the resulting glass negative could either be mounted against a dark background to create the appearance of a positive photo or used to make multiple positive prints on paper. Most paper prints created between the 1850s and the 1880s were made with wet or dry collodion plates.
Did You Know?
Collodion is a mixture of gun cotton (nitrocellulose), alcohol and ether that quickly dries to form a durable waterproof film; it was first used in medicine to cover minor skin lesions. Frederick Scott Archer added potassium iodide to the mixture to create a photosensitive emulsion.
Ambrotype portrait of a girl, ca. 1870 (State Archives of Florida)
