Issue 206. Interview by Terry Hope (April 2023)

Landscape photography is one of the genres most favoured by fine art photographers, but what makes Alex Boyd stand out from the crowd is the fact that he works with vintage cameras coupled with ancient photographic processes, achieving work that has a strangely ethereal feel, full of soft and muted tones and seemingly from a different age. “I’m quite shy,” he says, “so landscape photography made sense really. I’d found books by Fay Godwin such as Land in my local library, and was enthralled by her work. Through her I learned about framing and composition. It wasn’t until much, much later that I’d have the confidence to shoot portraits, something I spent a few months doing in the Faroe Islands. Landscapes in comparison seem so straightforward, as you can take all the time in the world to shoot them.” Growing up in Scotland Alex had the good fortune to be surrounded by astonishingly beautiful and varied scenery, and it gave him plenty of scope to develop his style as he travelled across the country on hiking trips. Initially he took along with him a rather beaten-up second-hand Nikon 35mm camera and, being hard up in the early days, sometimes a 36-exposure roll of film would last him for weeks!

“For about five years I taught myself photography while working on a project called ‘Sonnets,’ which was a collaboration with the National Poet of Scotland Edwin Morgan,” Alex says. “I worked closely with one of my best friends, David Henning, as a model, and we’d create these somewhat surreal landscapes across the country. “Sonnets was well received, and I exhibited it across Europe, most notably as colossal projections in Romania on the Palace of the Parliament. Eventually however I grew tired of doing the same thing, and being known for the same series, so was already contemplating doing something else entirely. At that point however I just wasn’t sure what.

“In 2010 I was in London exhibiting some work at Fulham Palace, and decided to visit the new show at the Photographers’ Gallery: Sally Mann – The Family and the Land. I had been familiar with wet-plate for a while, having exhibited alongside some tintype portraits the year before. It wasn’t until I saw Mann’s work however that I realised just how powerful the process could be as an expressive medium. Her image of the American South seemed haunted and spectral, and it was an aesthetic that appealed immediately to me.” A year later Alex signed up for a workshop in Glasgow that was covering alternative processes, and from there he perfected the art of pouring clean, perfect plates. Soon he was out in the landscape with a his darkbox, creating images of mountains and castles, often in truly awful weather. Eventually his work with wet-plate started getting noticed, and he was offered the chance to do residencies in Ireland and with the Royal Scottish Academy in Skye. He also started appearing on television and taking on commissions alongside his day job as a museums officer.

Alex specialises in the wet collodion process, which was invented by Frederick Scott Archer and served to revolutionise photography back in 1851 since it allowed images to be made on glass and reproduced in high quality, something not possible with Daguerreotypes or Calotypes. “The name tells you something about the process,” says Alex. “It uses collodion, a syrupy substance which is made by dissolving gun-cotton in ether. This is poured onto tin or glass, and then submerged in a bath of liquid silver, which in effect produces film. Once the camera is set-up on the subject, the plate is loaded into the rear of the camera, exposed, and then developed within a dark place such as a tent.

The image is then washed and fixed using potassium cyanide, a chemical to be treated with the utmost respect. “The plate must be ‘wet’ throughout the process, which means you have approximately 15 minutes from the first pour of collodion to developing it before it becomes unworkable. In hot weather, this time may even be shorter. This means that where ever you go with your camera, your chemicals and darkroom need to travel along too. “When I started out I took a mobile dark-box with me, a cumbersome wooden device for the developing of images, which was a nightmare to use anywhere other than by the side of the road. Later I took advice and worked with a much lighter pop-up homemade darkbox using a lined sheet and foldable box to work within, which made working on mountainsides possible. More recently I’ve been using a pop-up tent made by Ilford, and it’s perfect – lightweight and useful. I just wish they had produced it 15 years ago! “What makes collodion special though is the way that it records the scene. It ‘sees’ the world differently, rendering reds as black and blues as whites – it extends further into the blue spectrum than we can see. There’s also the stickiness of collodion to take into consideration, which often leads to my plates being covered with interesting artefacts, such as grass seeds and midges, that have been forever entombed in the emulsion.”

Working in this way also meant that Alex needed to be infinitely adaptable, prepared to take advantage of whatever facilities might be to hand to enable him to carry out his work. On one expedition to Ireland he made use of an abandoned WWII bunker, blacking out the observation slits and doorway to create a temporary studio that sheltered him from all weathers. At other times he would plan carefully, obsessing over weather forecasts and restricting shooting only to times when he had the most UV light. “I tend to have strict itineraries when I make images,” he says, “but with lots of room within that to spend extensive time within chosen locations. I’m only limited in my access to fresh water, and the chemistry I bring with me. In terms of a normal working day, I’ll probably make about ten plates at most, and will probably be happy with one or two of these. The good thing with collodion is that if you don’t like an image on glass, you can always remove it and start again.”

Along with working with an early process, Alex frequently goes the whole hog and produces images using an appropriately ancient camera and lens, and the combination enables him to produce some delightfully ethereal results. “When I started with collodion I used a series of vintage lenses, such as a Darlot Petzval, and some wonderfully unique lenses from the 1870s. They create their own feel, and I enjoyed using studio portrait lenses on landscape subjects such as sea stacks. At that time I was also using a huge 10x10in wooden camera, a beautiful reproduction of a Victorian original made in the United States.

“The prospect of hours of editing time isn’t one that fills anyone I know with joy, and the same is true with collodion. You may end up taking less shots, but they’re stronger ones.”

“Eventually however, as I became more ambitious, I’d more carefully consider my load-out, as every extra kilogram on my back would inevitably result in fatigue on longer hikes. The 10x10 camera and darkbox were completely impractical unless I had a few assistants to help me. “Instead, I initially tried using an old British military MPP 4x5, which was fairly robust, but still far too heavy. In the end I settled on an Ebony RW45, a beautiful but lightweight camera designed for hiking. Going from large plates down to 4x5in might seem like a loss, but the detail on a glass plate is still incredible and, as I don’t tend to exhibit these, it doesn’t matter. There is a contemporary trend to build bigger and bigger wet-plate cameras to make huge tintypes, but it’s a world I really don’t understand.” Even a photographer like Alex, so closely wedded to the world of art photography, has to have one eye on the commercial aspects and, along with print sales and the Royal Scottish Academy Artist in Residence posting on the Isle of Skye , he was also awarded a scholarship to work and photograph in the mountains of the Japanese Alps, while a number of books have featured his work. For his latest, The Point of the Deliverance, he wanted to collaborate with a UK publisher who had a track record of bringing out high quality photography books, and Kozu Books in Bath seemed like the natural fit. The book tells the story of Alex’s ten-year journey around the coast, and features some 70 photographs, many never exhibited before.

Alex is also currently putting together a UK exhibition of the work, and will have a large solo exhibition of the series at the Perth Centre for Photography in Australia this May. “For me the approach is very much a personal one,” he says. “It’s about not taking pictures sometimes. I tend to find that people who’ve been working with photography for a while try to nail the shot in a few takes and get it in camera. The prospect of hours of editing time isn’t one that fills anyone I know with joy, and the same is true with collodion. You may end up taking less shots, but they’re stronger ones.”

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