Word: collodion
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Dates: during 1983-1983
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Nineteenth century travel photographers used chemicals and light to catch distant realities upon a collodion wet plate and bear them home in velvet-lined boxes to London or New York. It was a cumbersome wizardry that they practiced, lumbering across Mexico or Africa in darkroom wagons. In desert heat they crawled under layers of blankets, into lightless black bags, to change their photographic plates. When a photographer named Captain Payer was taking pictures in Egypt for the Viceroy in 1863, the fellahin thought that his camera was a Pandora's box, and-that his black bellows contained cholera; they...