There’s a moment in this episode of the Nerdy Photographer Podcast where guest Britt Bradley — the alternative process photographer known as Nitrate Fox — and I land on a simple but sharp idea: the truth of a photograph was never just what’s in the frame. It’s also everything the photographer chose to leave out of it.
Bradley has spent years thinking about that idea from both sides of the camera. By day, Britt works in archives and museums, handling glass plate negatives and silver gelatin prints — including time with the Dorothea Lange Archive at the Oakland Museum. By practice, they’re a wet plate collodion photographer working under the name Nitrate Fox, using a 170-year-old process to photograph queer and gender-expansive communities today. And for the past three years, that practice has centered on Jamnesia, a self-published photo book documenting the roller derby community — shot entirely in tintypes, made in a mobile darkroom nicknamed Ruby, on the road across the country.
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Wet plate history and the “white male gaze”
Bradley’s starting point for the conversation is blunt: collodion, historically, has been “a perpetual representation of the white male gaze.” Years of handling archival negatives showed them the pattern up close — in 1850s treaty photographs, for instance, white generals are almost always seated while people of color stand behind them. That’s not incidental. Collodion requires long exposures, and a seated subject holds still more easily than a standing one, so who got to sit and who had to stand was itself a decision about whose image mattered most.
Bradley also points out something less discussed: collodion is a UV process, so skin with more melanin renders two to four shades darker than it would in a comparable silver gelatin print. That’s a technical fact with a real historical consequence — the medium itself was never neutral.
Bradley’s response isn’t to pretend that history away. It’s to bring it into the room. “I’ll never be able to fully level the field of power between the camera and the sitter,” they say, “but I’d like to at least kind of bring them up as level as I can get them.” In practice, that means real conversations with sitters about consent and control — and, notably, sometimes sharing or fully signing over copyright of the final plate to the person photographed, especially when photographing people of color. The photographer keeps the right to exhibit or print the image; the sitter keeps the object itself, and the say over what happens to it.
Slowing everything down
Wet plate collodion isn’t just conceptually different from digital — it’s physically demanding in a way that reshapes the whole sitting. The plate has to stay wet through exposure and development, which means the photographer has to be within a very short distance of a working darkroom, using chemistry that responds to heat, humidity, and available UV in ways that can’t be fully predicted or measured on site. Bradley describes it as feeling “more like jazz than classical music” — you’re reading conditions and improvising in real time.
That constraint produces one of the episode’s best stories: shooting on Fremont Street in Old Las Vegas for Jamnesia, Bradley had negotiated to stay within 100 feet of the mobile darkroom — only to discover, once permits were finalized, that the actual distance was closer to a quarter mile, and mall police wouldn’t allow skating the route between shots. The result: 16 plates, 120-degree heat, and a full afternoon of running back and forth on foot, silver nitrate staining down one leg until, Bradley jokes, both legs looked tattooed by the end of the day.
But the slowness has an upside that shapes the actual images. Because a plate takes real time and can fail, Bradley brings each developed plate back to show the sitter mid-session — and if it isn’t working, they talk about it and try again together. That back-and-forth turns the sitter into an active collaborator rather than a passive subject, and it’s central to how Bradley thinks about consent and authorship in the final image.
Photographing derby from the inside
Bradley is direct about why Jamnesia looks the way it does: they didn’t want to shoot roller derby “from the outside looking in,” the way journalists and documentarians typically do. Bradley is a derby skater themself, and the project grew out of that membership rather than an outsider’s curiosity. That distinction matters especially given collodion’s own history as a tool used to catalog marginalized people ethnographically in the 19th century — indigenous people, prisoners, queer people, photographed as specimens rather than subjects.
Rather than avoid that history, Bradley leans into naming it directly with the people they photograph — talking openly about race, gender, sexism, and othering before the camera comes out, and letting sitters decide how they want to respond to those tropes in the image. “It’s something I think is gonna be there, regardless of whether or not you address it,” Bradley says. “So you might as well address it.”
That insider position also changed what the project ended up being about. Bradley expected to document derby’s speed and physicality — the hits, the falls, the outfits. What surfaced instead, plate after plate, was community: teammates pooling money for a skater with a broken bone, players crying in their cars after a bad bout, derby names built from an entirely different self than the one people bring to work or family. Over and over, skaters told Bradley some version of the same thing: derby isn’t the mask — it’s the moment the mask comes off.
One plate captures that quiet intensity better than any action shot could, in Bradley’s view: a lineup of skaters from the Lilac City team seated on the bench, the jammer leaning forward, tensed to get up. It’s not Bradley’s favorite plate technically. But every jammer who has seen it recognizes the exact feeling of the fifteen seconds before you’re back on the track — no talking, no relaxing, just watching and waiting to go again.
Embracing the accident
Collodion’s unpredictability — fogging, chemical artifacts, plates that don’t develop the way you planned — is something Bradley has learned to treat as material rather than failure. Jamnesia includes a deliberately imperfect plate from that Las Vegas shoot, artifacts and all, because the flaws tell part of the story that a technically clean plate couldn’t: the heat, the running, the conditions of that particular day. “Sometimes the artifacts tell more about the story in the day,” Bradley says, describing wet plate as “a great exercise in learning acceptance” for a recovering perfectionist.
On starting out
Asked for advice for anyone getting into alternative process photography, Bradley doesn’t hedge: take a workshop from someone who already practices the process you want to learn. It’s expensive, they acknowledge, but it will save years of frustration compared to self-teaching through trial, error, and Facebook groups. “Let everybody else tell you no,” Bradley says elsewhere in the conversation, about pushing past the fear of asking. “Don’t be the person who stops yourself before you even start.”
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About My Guest
Britt Bradley (Nitrate Fox) alternative process photographer and artist. Her work explores identity, empowerment, subculture, and personal narrative through hand-crafted photographic processes that bridge contemporary storytelling with 19th-century techniques. Bradley’s work has been exhibited nationally and was recognized as a Photolucida Critical Mass Top 50 photographer and a LensCulture Critics’ Choice selection. She is the author of Jamnesia, a monograph documenting the world of roller derby through Wet Plate Collodion.
Website: nitratefox.com
Instagram: https://instagram.com/Nitrate_Fox
TikTok: https://tiktok.com/Nitrate_Fox
Book: Jamnesia: The Alternative Art of Athleticism — self-published, limited edition, available now at nitratefox.com
Will You Try Alternative Process Photography?
Talking with Britt got me thinking about trying some alternative process photography. How about you? I would love to see any shots you’ve taken with alternative processes. Tag me – @thenerdyphoto – on Instagram, Threads, and TikTok so I can see!
