The Plate Cannot See Red

The Plate Cannot See Red

What this makes

Hand it a photograph and it takes the picture again on a wet collodion plate — an emulsion blind to red and wide awake to blue, so lips go black, a sky goes blank white, and the whole look follows from that one fact. Two fields.

You are given ONE photograph. Return ONE image: the same subject photographed again on a wet collodion plate. Follow every line. Replace only the FIELDS block; everything after it is fixed.

First — do you have the photograph and the fields?

Say what this makes before you ask anything, in one or two sentences of their own words. Someone who has just pasted this has no idea what they are being asked for, and questions arriving cold are questions answered badly.

If no photograph is attached, stop and ask for one. This re-photographs a particular subject, so there has to be a picture of it.

If either field below still has braces around it, stop and ask. Put both questions in one short message, and show the example under each one so they can see the shape of a useful answer. Wait for the replies, then work. Never fill a brace yourself.

Ask in whatever language they are writing to you in. Translate the questions and the examples; do not make someone read English to tell you what they want.

If the photograph is attached and both fields are filled in, ignore this and carry on.

Fields — replace these two lines only

• What in the picture is red, and what is blue: {the red things and the blue things}
• How long the sitter had to hold still, said as what moves: {something that could not stay put}

The law everything else follows from

The object is untouched. The photograph of it is taken again.

Everything about the recording changes: a different emulsion, a different sensitivity, an exposure measured in seconds. Nothing about the subject changes. The lipstick is still red, the shirt is still blue, the poppies are still poppies. The plate is blind to some of those colours; nobody repainted anything. Same face, same clothes, same arrangement, same light.

The emulsion sees blue and not red

This is the whole rewrite, and every part of the look follows from it.

Wet collodion responds to blue and ultraviolet and barely at all to red. It is not a black and white photograph: it is a photograph of a different world, where the tones are in the wrong order. So, before anything else, rearrange the picture:

• Red records as black. Red lips are black. A red flower is black. A red bus, a red brick, a red jumper — all near black, darker than anything around them.
• Blue records as white, and the deeper the blue the stronger the effect. A clear sky is blank white paper with no cloud in it whatsoever, because it overexposed long before the clouds registered. Blue eyes are almost as pale as the whites around them. A very pale blue is already close to white, so it barely moves — look for this on saturated blues, not on a pastel.
• Green records dark, so foliage, grass and a green painted door all come out heavy and near black.
• Yellow records dark as well, which surprises people.
• What is neutral stays where it was. A grey background is still mid grey.

If a red thing in the result is a middle grey, the run has made an ordinary monochrome photograph and this has not been done.

What that does to a face

• Skin comes out mottled, because it is not one colour. Anything reddish in it goes dark and everything else does not.
• Lips are dark, often the darkest thing in the face.
• Freckles, blemishes, broken veins, a shaving rash and sunburn all darken, which is why every sitter of the period looks weathered.
• Eyes look pale and staring when they are blue or grey, and dark and flat when they are brown.
• Nothing is smoothed or flattered. The plate is unkind and that is the point of it.

Seconds, not a fraction of one

• Whatever the second field names as moving is smeared — a blink showing as two half-open lids, a strand of hair drawn out, a hand doubled.
• Everything that held still is extremely sharp, sharper than a modern snapshot, with enormous detail in the still parts.
• Anything that moved right through is simply absent: a person who walked across the frame is not there at all.
• The subject looks composed and slightly rigid, the way somebody holding a pose for eight seconds looks.

The plate itself

• A shallow depth of field from a large lens: the plane of the eyes sharp, the ears already going.
• The corners fall off a little in brightness and sharpness.
• The tone is the plate's own — a cool grey-black through to cream, or a warm brown-black, but one consistent tone across the whole picture and not a sepia wash laid over it.
• The pour leaves its own edge: the coating is slightly uneven at one side, and slightly thinner in one corner.
• No damage. No scratches, no cracks, no chemical stains, no fingerprints, no dust, no fake age. This is a good plate, freshly made.

Never

• Text, numerals, a date, a studio mark, a caption or a watermark anywhere, in any script.
• Scratches, cracks, stains, sprocket holes, torn edges, film borders or any applied damage.
• A frame, a case, a mount, a hand holding it, or a photograph of a photograph.
• A sepia filter over an otherwise modern set of tones.
• A subject the photograph did not contain.

What it should read as

A plate somebody made this morning in 1863 — and the giveaway is that the mouth is the darkest thing in the picture.