Wet Plate Photography

with Jaclyn Silverman
PHOTO 613 001 | 1.5 credits | $100 Lab Fee
August 24–30, 2025

Using the historic and time-honored wet-plate collodion process, students will move between the studio, the community, and the natural environment to create glass plate images and photographic objects. We will explore the fundamentals of large format view camera photography while using individual mobile darkrooms for plate processing and production. This course considers the technical information, historical use, and advancement of photographic technology in comparison with contemporary conceptual use by late-20th-century and current 21st-century artists such as Helen Maureen Cooper, Joni Sternbach, and Sally Mann. Readings available for reference include Basic Collodion Technique: Ambrotype and Tintype, by Mark Osterman and France Scully Osterman, and Chemical Pictures: The Wet Plate Collodion Book, by Quinn B. Jacobson. Students will work independently, progressing from tintype positives to glass negatives and ambrotype objects. Subjects can include the still life, portraiture, installation for performance, or natural documentation of the environment. Daily evaluations and cross-classroom conversation will address technical and conceptual issues, and question historical and contemporary uses. The final product will include a suite of quarter glass plates in the student’s own style, driven by individual concept or idea.

Jaclyn Silverman (she/her) is an artist from Youngstown, Ohio, currently living and working in Chicago, Illinois. Her work thinks about the significance of place determined by the dynamics of family and community cultural relationships through environmental portraiture and landscape made by means of educational photographic projects. As Founding Artistic Director and piloting artist-in-residence with Chicago artist residency and non-profit organization CPS Lives, Silverman maintained an independent arts program and project on Chicago’s far southeast side with students from George Washington High School and residents of the Hegewisch neighborhood from 2017-2023. Commissioned by Theaster Gates, Silverman’s photographic installations of the Johnson Publishing Company archives were published in part of the exhibition, A Johnson Publishing Story at Stony Island Arts Bank. Collectively reinstating departmental portfolio exchanges, she co-curated the archive based exhibition Within the Portfolios 1968-2016; a History of Photography from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Silverman is a returning faculty with Ox-Bow School of Art & Artists’ Residency and the Development Manager for the Museum of Contemporary Photography at Columbia College Chicago. She received her BFA from The Ohio State University and MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.