In my quest for perfection in wet plate – to make absolutely clean plates – I lost sight of the importance of truly looking, of really seeing the person or the still life. Making tintypes that are completely flawless bores me absolutely now.
Furthermore, I’ve encountered various problems stemming from the metal and the coating of the tintypes. My silver bath looks like crap, has black metal dots in it, and it’s just massively frustrates me to no end.
During a long evening with Claus and our best friend Peter, I moaned about it endlessly and vented my frustration about how much it annoys me. And how the tintypes piss me off. And the perfection. And that’s when I decided that evening: From now on, only on glass, and with massive mistakes and smears on them. Wild plates with subjects that do more than just depict.
We completely followed through with this during our two weeks in the UK. Claus and I were pulling in the same direction again, and the results were very messy, smeared, but beautiful ambrotypes. We even made paper prints on the road with Chris and Attila using these plates. I find these clean paper prints, which show all the smears and grime of the plate, simply wonderful.
Constantly rethinking and changing my style has the disadvantage that I don’t have a real recognition factor, like other artists. You don’t immediately look at these plates and think, ‚aha, that’s by „the Maleks“‚. Presumably, it would be much better if we could find a gallery to represent us. On the other hand, it’s also incredibly fun to keep changing. I’d say we’ll just carry on like this, a fun back and forth. And if by chance, the thing emerges from it – the thing that makes us so happy we don’t want to do anything else anymore – then that will be it.
(A triple exposure by the fantastic photographer Tom Lee. It was an honour to be in your studio. https://www.tomleephoto.com/)
