ALLAN BARNES wet plate collodion photographer
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Written by Nathan Zanon Photography by Sannie Celeridad Instagram barnesfoto Tumblr allanbarnes.tumblr.com
llan Barnes creates stunning photographs that look as if they were unearthed from an antique book in an old library, and that’s because the process he uses is more than 150 years old. The technique, called wet plate collodion, results in monochromatic pictures that are haunting, soft, and beautiful, with a grainy depth that can’t be recreated with modern film or filters. Finding his way to an antique photo method has been a long journey for Barnes, who grew up in Detroit and had an early love for complicated large format photos before pivoting to more traditional 35mm film as his career developed. Barnes fell in love with a large format camera and started making landscapes of Detroit, and later went to live in Spain for a year, where he
tried taking a giant large format camera with him. “It was so impractical to take on public transportation, so I quickly gave up and started using 35mm pretty much exclusively,” Barnes says. After returning to Detroit from his travels, he began a successful career in photojournalism, getting assignments from local and national publications and doing a lot of traveling. Eventually, he was offered a unique gig as a staff photographer at a magazine in Guam. The magazine was started by a photographer he knew from Detroit, who was originally from Guam and moved back and started a chain of print magazines. “I got encouraged to try lots of new formats there, like do some Polaroid transfers, try some large format, do a travel piece,” Barnes says. “I had
