The Alchemy of Attention

The plate is black aluminum, the size of a notebook page. Alanah Correia coats it in collodion, a liquid that smells of ether and nail polish remover. She submerges it in silver nitrate for three minutes in a small, light-tight box. She works under a draped black canvas, a red headlamp is her only guide. The plate, now light-sensitive and milky, is slid into a holder, then into the back of a camera that weighs the same as a frozen turkey. The exposure might be thirty seconds, or longer if the Nova Scotia sun is weak. Then, back under the canvas, she pours developer and watches a negative emerge. Finally, in a tray, the fixer. This is the part she says never gets old. The image slips from negative to positive, a moment pulled from time and made solid, right there in the tray. That is the technicality of the process, the ritual for trapping light. The outcome is a conjured ghost, an image that haunts and holds, a cat's cradle of light and shadow. Tintype is an entanglement of foreground and background; the subject and the landscape merge like water over water. The image is a wraith, an apparation, an instant relic.

Walter Benjamin mourned the loss of "aura" in his essay on mechanical reproduction, that singular presence of an artwork bound to a specific time and place. Here, in the wet plate collodion process that Correia practices, aura gets resurrected. Each tintype is unrepeatable. It is born once in the silver nitrate bath and dies if the plate dries out before development. It is art at it's finest, unreproducable, finite, and enduring. "You get one photo," she says. If the subject blinks, or if a comet-shaped flaw streaks the plate, she reshoots. It is a form of photography from the mid-1800s, a process of extreme limitations." A process of extreme devotion, "Attention is equivalent to devotion or reverence. I really feel that when I am making tintypes, that devotional aspect to it, because it requires so much of you" This is what Mary Oliver meant when she wrote that "Attention is the beginning of devotion."

Correia is 31, a mixture of Portuguese, Irish, and Acadian, from Lawrencetown, Nova Scotia. She has lived in New Zealand and India, and studied a branch of Bhakti yoga in Vrindavan. Now she is on the South Shore, part of a web of musicians and dancers, a community woven through square dances and two-step nights across the province. She speaks of this web with a hard-won tenderness, acknowledging the Nova Scotian itch to leave, and the deeper pull to return.

She found photography young, through a website called DeviantArt and her grandfather's Canon AE-1. She worked at a grocery store and spent her salary on film. Later, at college, she learned digital techniques and then lost her way. "I had this deep sense of imposter syndrome... I didn't know my why anymore." The camera felt like a performance, an awkward tool. She didn't touch one for years. Returning to analog, to the physical doing, was a return to love. Tintype, with its stink and weight and unforgiving pace, became her practice.

When asked about why not use a digital Camera, Correia looked at a far corner and was lost in a sad moment of brief silence. "Now, as a culture," she finally said, "we have an illusion of the infinite. The infinite is there for us to consume, but the infinite doesn't come from nowhere. There's so much exploitation. As soon as something is finite, we assign more value to it. And everything is finite, including clean drinking water, but we don't act like that, right?" Historically, humans have been obsessed with the infinite, with immortal gods and alchemy and enternal youth. Today, the infinite is a product to consume, a playlist on repeat, a keyboard that does not need ink refills, and a never ending camera roll. However, gold is valuable precisely because it is finite. What is ephemeral is more enchanting than what is eternal. Our human temporariness is perhaps subject to more reverance than the immortality of our dieties, because, unlike our gods, our life ends.

"I'm attracted to things that have a lot of steps and require a lot of presence and attention, " Correia explains. "I think of making crème brûlée. There are definitely easier desserts I could make, but I like having to pay attention to each and every step or something could go terribly wrong." The tintype cannot lie the way digital photography can. No Photoshop, no unlimited exposures, no safety net. The plate holds only what was there: light, chemistry, time.

Correia is now scheming a cross-country tintype tour, driving from Nova Scotia to Dawson City and back, setting up her portable darkroom in towns along the way. "Tintype pop-ups," she calls them, planned for late August. We asked her to make at stop at Oesa in Banff, and she agreed. If you live in the Bow Valley and you're interested in having your soul trapped by a witch, book your session with Correia at www.correiaphoto.com