Michael Pritchard The artist's portrait of Gang tells us about their personality and the use of the collodion process adds another layer to the portrait making the subject and the portrait's execution insightful and powerful.
This portrait of the researcher and artist Valerie Wolf Gang is created on a glass plate using the wet plate collodion process, a 19th-century technique where the image slowly emerges through light and chemistry. Valerie stands at the intersection of tradition and technological future. Dressed in folklore, she embodies cultural memory, while her work in artificial intelligence questions what it means to be human today. The image becomes a dialogue between past and future, reflecting the limits of both photography and machines in capturing human presence.