// Recent plates
Selections from
the working archive.
Updated as the darkroom dries. Click any plate for provenance, camera notes, and a short paragraph of field memory.
An evolving archive of black-and-white and early chromogenic photography made between 1968 and last Thursday. Each print, a conversation with light.
Twelve plates made in Aragón, across a single Thursday in November, between 06:14 and 07:12 in the morning. The fog did not lift at the expected time. The camera, a borrowed Hasselblad 500C, did not fail me once.
The resulting series is built from negatives developed by hand — a slower, and, I now insist, more honest process than any sensor permits.
Most of what I photograph, nobody will ever see. I have made, conservatively, 42,000 exposures in twenty-four years. The archive you browse here contains 482. The other 41,518 exist as negatives in forty-three boxes, six of which are in my mother's attic, four in a storage locker in Porto, and the rest in a cabinet three metres from where I am writing this.
This is not tragedy. This is, I think, the whole point. A photograph made, at cost, and not shared, is perhaps the only one made entirely for its own sake. Every image I make that does not reach you is a small, private letter to the light itself.
What follows in this archive is the correspondence I chose to publish. The rest, I chose to keep.
Editions of 25, printed and signed by hand, from my own darkroom in Braga. Replies typically within a week — the darkroom comes first.
s@silverhalide.press