Authors: Lena Kasten & Megan Briers

Largely forgotten photographic practices play important but varied roles in Jonathan Haid, Megan Briers, and Lena Kasten’s PhD projects, conducted through the International Max Planck Research School (IMPRS) “Knowledge and Its Resources: Historical Reciprocities” at the MPIWG. Through the IMPRS, they were able to organize a two-day workshop entitled “Photographic Practices of the Nineteenth Century” (March 4–5, 2026), which involved a theoretical and a practical day.

Exposing Experimental Cultures of Early Photography

We could have been soaking in the sun on one of the first bright days of spring. Instead, we stood gathered around a sink in a darkroom, scarcely lit by red and orange light. As we watched a milky glass plate being gently moved back and forth, faint outlines began to emerge on its surface. Our group, consisting of historians of science, art historians, and media scholars, observed the plate—which was then rinsed—in awe. Little by little, the fine lines deepened into dark patches, gradually revealing the negative impression of an image we had just taken in the neighboring room. While lowering the plate into a tray of fixing solution, Maximilian Zeitler, the photographer who held the plate throughout the process, speaks of nineteenth-century photographic practices as appearing almost like alchemy to us today.

Today, the majority of people taking photographs are abstracted from the technicalities of what makes this possible—a sign, in part, of the rapid maturation of the technology that traces its origins to the early decades of the 1800s. Yet when photography was first introduced, the process of obtaining pictures was highly experimental and had uncertain outcomes. Photographers of the nineteenth century not only had to master the right combination of weather, light, and working conditions but had to find the optimal lenses, glass plates, emulsions, paper types, and silver salts to meet their various requirements, before even thinking about the ideal development process.

Photographic Reconstruction and Embodiment as Historical Method

As we observed the various struggles of our actors in their reflections or results of this unstable practice, we felt a shared sense of frustration ourselves. If you tried to explain to someone today how to take a photograph on their phone, you might neglect to mention what we might see as trivial details, like how to unlock the phone, or how to access the photograph once you’d clicked the white button at the bottom of the screen. Similarly, our historical sources often assume a level of knowledge from their readers which has been somewhat lost over time.

In tracing historical relationships between knowledge and resources, part of our work involves trying to understand how and why our actors thought and behaved the way they did. However, even if our actors, like astronomers or ethnographers, had fully enumerated all the stages required to produce photographs, certain practices cannot be fully codified in writing. Therefore, from the late 1980s and early 1990s onwards, replications, reconstructions, and re-enactments have become more important to help historians reach a more holistic and embodied understanding through practical engagement with sources, tools, and materials.

Practical engagement often requires collaborating with experts from other fields, like Maximilian Zeitler, or Max. Initially trained as an engineer, Max recently decided to focus on his long-term interest in photography and open a studio in Wedding. Although he consults similar sources to us, he has a different yet complementary perspective, aiming to recreate largely forgotten historical practices. Learning through historical handbooks, journals, and hands-on experience, Max is one of the few people still employing such techniques today and luckily agreed to share his knowledge across a two-day workshop.

Day One: Focusing on Photography’s Theoretical and Historical Background

Through presentations and Max’s own photographic work, we spent the first morning learning about the theoretical and historical background of wet-collodion and dry gelatine plates photography, which were common practices in the nineteenth century. In the afternoon, participants prepared questions about their own sources and discussed them with Max, who contributed both his own practical expertise and knowledge of a variety of relevant and previously overlooked sources.

Day Two: Practicing Nineteenth-Century Photographic Methods

On the following day, we then experienced firsthand what it entails to capture, develop, and stabilize an image. Seeing the images slowly materialize on glass plates was fascinating and the development of the wet collodion plates was largely successful. But just as intriguing for us was the fragility, and learning just how many opportunities there were for something to go wrong. We could, for example, see how so-called “comets” appeared on the subsequent prints whenever tiny particles of dust fell on the plates while they were being coated with wet collodion.

Developing some of the dry gelatin plates also presented us with some challenges. As an image began to appear in the developing bath, the gelatin layer started to lift off the plate and flow into the solution, which, as Max explained, could be because the plate was not cold enough during the exposure. The team working on the development tried to save the image by guiding the loose gelatin layer back onto the plate. As visible in the cyanotype print of this plate, thisleft an equally beautiful yet unintended effect of uneven, layered edges.

Reproducing Annie Maunder’s 1898 Eclipse Photograph    

We also reproduced a drawing of a photograph printed in a book. The base for the drawing, the original plate, is believed to be lost and was initially exposed under very different conditions on January 22, 1898. As the moon was blocking the majority of the Sun’s light during a total solar eclipse, Annie Maunder, an astronomer frequently found on eclipse expeditions, captured the sun’s coronal streamers extending further than anyone had managed before. This particular photograph, taken with a Sandell triple coated dry plate in Talni, India, is just one of many that this workshop helped us gain a new perspective on. Consulting one of the handbooks Max used to develop his craft, we learned about the mechanism behind the Sandell plates.

Reflecting on our difficulties with a few of the dry plates in a Berlin studio, it now makes much more sense why Maunder entrusted the plates to the manufacturer in London for development, rather than doing this in a makeshift dark room in India. Even if the circumstances under which we took our photographs were necessarily different from our actors, the insights we gained through working with similar materials and methods were tremendous.

Developing Perspectives

Beginning to understand the inherent fragility, skill, flexibility, and challenges involved in making something visible in the nineteenth century helps us to look at our sources with different (and more sympathetic!) eyes. A new perspective, at which we could only arrive at through experiencing both the instability of the process and the joy felt when the image that you hoped for starts to appear on the plate.