“There's a kind of alchemy to making portraits with an 8x10 camera and the wet plate collodion process. It’s unpredictable, raw, and hauntingly beautiful. The result is something almost sacred—rife with artifact, a portrait rendered on black glass, holding time and soul in its stillness. Each one feels like a nod to the past, fragile and enduring.

There's a vulnerability in this process. It often exposes something deeper within the subject, something unguarded that only a timeless technique can capture. You can see the weight of the subject’s ancestry, a glimpse into the lives that came before them, as if the past rises up through the shadows on the glass. Perhaps it’s the West that runs in my blood, the wildness of it all, inherited from my own ancestry. The frontier is part me, and somehow, it finds its way into these portraits.

—eo