Riichi Yamaguchi

Riichi Yamaguchi is a Japanese photographer whose work has long focused on physical expression. More recently, however, he has become fascinated by wet plate photography, a classic 19th century photographic technique, and has begun taking portraits of people and flowers. Wet plate photography is a t...

Riichi Yamaguchi is a Japanese photographer whose work has long focused on physical expression. More recently, however, he has become fascinated by wet plate photography, a classic 19th century photographic technique, and has begun taking portraits of people and flowers. Wet plate photography is a technique in which a chemical reaction of silver nitrate and collodion chloride on a glass plate causes the image of light captured to appear, creating a unique glass photograph. In this technique, the appearance of the image is greatly affected by the condition of the chemicals and weather conditions, and fluid patterns may appear as traces of the chemical reaction. For this reason, no two wet plate photographs are the same. Wet plate photography was invented in England in 1851 and spread throughout the world. Many great people have been photographed using wet plate photography. Ryoma Sakamoto in Japan and Abraham Lincoln in the United States are documented. However, when the new technology of dry plate photography was invented 30 years later, wet plate photography was quickly forgotten. Today, however, advances in digital photography and the popularity of social media have led to a re-evaluation of the special textures and expressive power of wet plate photography. Yamaguchi's work is a type of wet plate photography known as "ambrotype" glass photography. The word is said to derive from the Greek word "ambrotos," meaning immortal or imperishable. Through his series of flowers, he hopes to preserve beauty and fragility forever as glass photographs.