Collodion: The Sticky Film That Captured Souls and Healed Wounds

In the grand tapestry of human invention, some threads are woven from deliberate genius, while others are born of happy accidents. Collodion belongs firmly to the latter. At its heart, it is a deceptively simple substance: a syrupy, slightly yellowish solution of Nitrocellulose (a volatile compound also known as guncotton) dissolved in a mixture of ether and alcohol. When exposed to air, the volatile solvents rapidly evaporate, leaving behind a thin, transparent, and surprisingly durable film of cellulose nitrate. This seemingly mundane property—the ability to create a “liquid skin”—propelled collodion on an extraordinary journey. From a humble kitchen mishap, it would rise to become a revolutionary medical dressing, saving countless lives on the battlefield. It would then achieve its zenith as the very medium of memory, becoming the chemical soul of 19th-century Photography and democratizing the act of capturing a human likeness. Collodion’s story is not merely one of chemistry; it is a vivid micro-history of an era grappling with science, art, war, and the very essence of identity, a tale of a sticky liquid that learned to heal flesh and hold light.

The genesis of collodion lies not in a quest for medicine or art, but in the volatile heart of 19th-century chemistry, an era of explosive discovery. The story begins in 1846, in the Basel, Switzerland kitchen of chemist Christian Friedrich Schönbein. As the oft-told legend goes, Schönbein, having commandeered the kitchen for an experiment with nitric and sulfuric acids, accidentally spilled the corrosive mixture. In a moment of panic, he grabbed the nearest cloth to mop it up—his wife’s cotton apron. After rinsing it, he hung it by the stove to dry, only to watch in astonishment as the apron flared up and vanished in a smokeless, instantaneous flash. He had unwittingly nitrated the cellulose in the cotton fibers, creating a powerful new explosive he would name guncotton. This new substance, far more potent and cleaner-burning than traditional Gunpowder, immediately captured the attention of military powers across Europe. Yet, this explosive discovery held a secret, a gentler alter ego waiting to be coaxed out. The same year, in Paris, two students, Louis-Nicolas Ménard and Florian Domonte, were investigating the properties of Schönbein's guncotton. They found that while guncotton was insoluble in water, it would readily dissolve in a solution of ether and alcohol. The result of this dissolution was a thick, viscous liquid they named “collodion,” from the Greek word kolla, meaning “glue.” It was sticky, highly flammable, and possessed the remarkable quality of drying into a clear, flexible film as the solvents evaporated. Initially, its purpose was unclear. A flammable, sticky goo derived from an explosive seemed more a curiosity than a utility. The pivot from chemical novelty to medical breakthrough came from across the Atlantic. In 1847, a Boston medical student named John Parker Maynard, having read about the new substance, proposed its use as a surgical dressing. The idea was simple but revolutionary. In an age before antibiotics and modern sterile techniques, wound infection was a rampant killer. A surgeon’s skill was often rendered moot by the sepsis that followed. Maynard suggested that collodion could be painted directly onto a wound or incision. The evaporating solvents would provide a cooling effect, and the resulting film would act as a “liquid bandage”—a waterproof, airtight barrier that sealed the wound from the contaminated air and grime of the world. It was an artificial scab, a second skin that could protect, hold sutures in place, and allow the body to heal underneath. The concept was adopted with astonishing speed. Doctors hailed it as a miracle. During the American Civil War, collodion became an indispensable part of the surgeon's kit. On battlefields from Gettysburg to Antietam, amidst the carnage of musket balls and cannon fire, surgeons would paint this sticky film over grisly wounds, providing a precious, albeit primitive, layer of protection against the ubiquitous threats of gangrene and tetanus. It was used to seal minor cuts, hold dressings in place, and even to protect the skin of amputees from irritation. This flammable curiosity, born from an explosive apron, had found its first great calling: not in destruction, but in preservation. Its ability to form a perfect, transparent film was about to find an even more profound purpose, one that would shift its legacy from healing the body to capturing its soul.

By the mid-19th century, photography was a nascent and magical art, but it was also a deeply flawed one. The two dominant processes, the Daguerreotype and the Calotype, each had significant drawbacks. The Daguerreotype produced a stunningly sharp, one-of-a-kind image on a polished silver plate, but it was fragile, expensive, and impossible to duplicate. The Calotype, invented by William Henry Fox Talbot, used paper negatives, which allowed for multiple prints, but the texture of the paper fibers inevitably softened the image, robbing it of the crystalline clarity of its rival. The world of photography was desperate for a medium that combined the sharpness of the Daguerreotype with the reproducibility of the Calotype. The solution came from an English sculptor and amateur chemist named Frederick Scott Archer. Archer, who used Calotypes to record his sculptures, was frustrated by the paper's imperfections. He began searching for a way to bind the light-sensitive silver salts to a perfectly smooth, transparent surface: a pane of Glass. The challenge was finding a binder—a substance that was transparent, chemically neutral, and could adhere evenly to the glass. He experimented with albumen (egg white), which was sticky but slow and difficult to work with. Then, in 1851, he had his Eureka moment. He turned to collodion. Archer realized that the very properties that made collodion an excellent liquid bandage also made it a perfect photographic binder. It was fluid enough to be poured evenly across a glass plate, and it dried into a thin, tough, and perfectly transparent film. His process, which he published freely without a patent, was ingenious and would come to be known as the Wet-Plate Collodion Process. It was a delicate, time-sensitive ballet of chemistry and light, an almost alchemical ritual that transformed photography from a rarified craft into a widespread phenomenon.

To create a collodion photograph was to engage in a process that demanded skill, patience, and speed. The photographer was part artist, part chemist, and part magician, often working out of a portable darkroom—a stuffy tent or a horse-drawn wagon reeking of chemicals. The ritual was unvarying:

• The Preparation: The process began with a meticulously cleaned pane of glass. Any speck of dust or greasy fingerprint could ruin the final image. The photographer would then take a bottle of “salted” collodion—collodion to which iodide and bromide salts had been added—and, in a single, flowing motion, pour it onto the center of the plate, tilting it carefully to ensure the viscous liquid coated the entire surface evenly. The excess was drained back into the bottle.
• The Sensitization: This step had to happen in the dark. The coated plate was immediately submerged in a bath of silver nitrate. A chemical reaction occurred: the iodide and bromide salts in the collodion combined with the silver nitrate to form silver iodide and silver bromide, the light-sensitive crystals that would form the image. After a few minutes, the plate was removed, now milky and opalescent, dripping with silver solution, and exquisitely sensitive to light. It was now “wet” and “alive.”
• The Exposure: Here, the race against time began. The wet plate had to be exposed in the Camera before the collodion film could dry, a window of perhaps ten to fifteen minutes. The photographer would rush the plate, secured in a light-proof holder, from the darkroom to the camera. The exposure itself could be lengthy, especially in low light. Subjects for portraits had to remain uncannily still, often held in place by metal braces hidden behind their bodies, to avoid blurring. This is the reason for the stern, unsmiling expressions common in Victorian portraits—holding a genuine smile for a minute or more was an impossible feat.
• The Development: Immediately after exposure, it was back to the darkroom. The photographer would pour a developing agent, typically pyrogallic acid or ferrous sulfate, over the plate. In a moment of pure magic, the latent image would materialize, as if summoned from the ether—ghostly, ethereal, and beautiful.

The resulting image on the glass was a negative. When placed against a dark background, however, its translucent, milky-white areas appeared as light tones, creating a positive image. This discovery gave birth to the Ambrotype (from the Greek ambrotos, meaning “immortal”), which became an immensely popular form of portraiture. An ambrotype was simply a collodion glass negative, backed with black varnish, cloth, or paper, and mounted in a decorative case like a Daguerreotype. It was far cheaper and quicker to produce, and it brought the cherished experience of having one's portrait made within reach of the burgeoning middle class. A further innovation led to the Tintype, which used a thin sheet of black-lacquered iron instead of fragile glass. Tintypes were even cheaper, more durable, and could be developed and handed to the customer within minutes. They became the currency of itinerant photographers at fairs, beaches, and military camps—the 19th-century equivalent of an instant photograph. Soldiers heading off to the Civil War would pose for a tintype portrait to leave with their loved ones, creating a vast and poignant visual archive of the conflict's human cost.

The impact of the wet-plate collodion process was nothing short of revolutionary. It shattered the exclusivity of photography and remade the visual landscape of the world.

• The Democratization of the Portrait: The speed and affordability of Ambrotypes and Tintypes fueled a boom in portrait studios across America and Europe. Families who could never have afforded a painted portrait could now possess a permanent, detailed likeness of their loved ones. Photography ceased to be a luxury for the elite and became a staple of middle-class life, a way to mark milestones, remember the dead, and construct a visual family history.
• The Birth of Photojournalism: For the first time, photography could leave the studio and document the world in stark reality. The wet-plate process, despite its cumbersome nature, was portable. Photographers like Mathew Brady and his team loaded their darkroom wagons and followed the Union Army, capturing the grim aftermath of battles. Their images of bloated corpses at Antietam and exhausted soldiers in camp were not heroic lithographs but visceral, unflinching documents. They brought the brutal reality of the Civil War into the parlors of the nation, forever changing the public's relationship with conflict.
• The Conquest of Landscape: Photographers like Carleton Watkins and Eadweard Muybridge hauled their heavy equipment into the untamed American West. They used large glass plates to capture the sublime grandeur of places like Yosemite Valley with a level of detail and clarity that was breathtaking. These images were not just beautiful; they were instrumental in shaping public perception of the West and fueled the movement to preserve these areas as national parks. The world, in all its vastness and detail, was being cataloged and made visible.

Collodion had reached its apex. It was the lifeblood of a global industry, the medium through which a generation saw itself and its world. But the very characteristic that gave the process its name—its “wetness”—was also its greatest weakness. The artist was a slave to the ticking clock and the portable darkroom. A new revolution was brewing, one that would liberate the photographer from the tyranny of wet collodion and, in doing so, signal the end of its reign.

The golden age of wet-plate collodion was brilliant but brief. The process was demanding, messy, and hazardous. The photographer's hands were permanently stained black by silver nitrate, and the fumes from ether, alcohol, and potassium cyanide (a common fixing agent) were toxic. The creative impulse was constantly tethered to the chemical process. The search was on for a “dry” plate—one that could be prepared in advance, stored for later use, and developed at the photographer's convenience. After years of experimentation by many, the breakthrough came in 1871 from an English physician and amateur photographer, Richard Leach Maddox. He proposed using a different binder: gelatin. By creating an emulsion of silver salts suspended in gelatin and coating it on glass plates, he created a stable, dry surface that was even more sensitive to light than wet collodion. The Dry-Plate Process was born. The advantages were immense. Plates could be mass-produced in factories, freeing photographers from the need to be chemists. The increased light sensitivity drastically reduced exposure times, making candid shots and action photography possible for the first time. The Camera was finally untethered from the darkroom wagon. This innovation paved the way for smaller, hand-held cameras and the birth of amateur photography, a revolution epitomized by George Eastman and his Kodak company's slogan: “You push the button, we do the rest.” By the 1880s, the wet-plate collodion process was commercially obsolete. Its laborious, alchemical ritual was replaced by the clean convenience of the factory-made dry plate and, later, flexible celluloid film (itself a descendant of collodion). The sticky, temperamental substance that had defined an era of photography was relegated to the dusty annals of history, a relic of a slower, more deliberate time. Yet, collodion did not vanish. It merely retreated from the limelight, finding continued life in less glamorous, but equally important, roles. In medicine, it persisted as a liquid bandage, the primary ingredient in products like New-Skin. In the printing industry, it was essential for photoengraving. Its chemical sibling, Nitrocellulose, became the basis for the first successful synthetic Plastics, namely Celluloid, and was the key component of modern smokeless gunpowder, bringing its story full circle back to its explosive origins.

For nearly a century, wet-plate collodion remained a historical curiosity, a process practiced by only a handful of dedicated historical reenactors and academics. But in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, a remarkable thing happened: collodion was reborn. In an age of digital saturation, where trillions of flawless, ephemeral images are captured and forgotten on hard drives and cloud servers, a growing number of artists and photographers began to look backward. They were drawn to the deliberate, hands-on, and imperfect nature of the 19th-century process. This modern revival is not driven by nostalgia alone, but by a desire for authenticity and materiality. To create a wet-plate photograph today is a conscious act of rebellion against the instantaneous and intangible nature of digital imaging. Each plate is a unique, handcrafted object. The “flaws” that Victorian photographers sought to eliminate—the swirls from the collodion pour, the dust motes, the fingerprints on the edge of the plate—are now embraced as marks of character, evidence of the artist's hand. The process yields an aesthetic that is impossible to replicate digitally: images of haunting depth, with a unique tonal range and an almost sculptural presence. Contemporary collodion artists are using this antique process to explore modern themes, from portraiture and landscape to conceptual art. They have rediscovered the magic in the darkroom, the thrill of watching an image materialize from a chemical bath. They have found that the slow, methodical ritual forces a deeper connection between the photographer, the subject, and the final object. In its modern incarnation, collodion is no longer a tool for mass documentation but a medium for personal expression, a bridge connecting the digital present to the very origins of the photographic art. The story of collodion is a powerful testament to the unpredictable journey of an invention. Born from a flash in a kitchen, it became a balm for wounded soldiers, the canvas for a generation's memories, and the window through which the world first saw itself with unflinching clarity. It rose, reigned, and fell, only to be resurrected as a symbol of craft and authenticity in a world rushing toward the intangible. It is the story of a simple, sticky substance that, for a brief and brilliant moment in history, learned how to stop time, heal skin, and hold the light.