Written by LAURA FRASER
Photos by Russell Monk and Daniel Borris, unless otherwise noted.

Three years ago, at the Torrente Galería in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, I noticed a photograph with an unusually sharp but unearthly quality. The photo, of nothing more than a cactus field, had the light and atmosphere of a silvery, partial lunar eclipse. In order to create this image, the gallery owner told me, the photographer had gone back to antique photography methods. These involved using a tent as a camera; he’d even given the tent a name—Saturno. Suddenly the photo, already prickling with mysterious energy, took on another dimension.

I immediately bought the piece, and every time I look at it, I feel as if I’m wandering in an ancient, cactus-studded dream. After walking into that dream over and over, I decided last year to visit the photographer, a Spanish ex-pat named Tomás Casademunt who lives in Cuernavaca, a mid-sized mountain town just south of Mexico City.

Instant Gratification vs. Precision

To make sure I understood Casademunt’s work, and that I asked the right questions, I took along two veteran photographers, Daniel Borris and Russell Monk. Like me, they live part-time in Mexico, and both had tinkered themselves with antique photography. Both had also spent their careers exploring exotic places (via helicopter, pick-up truck, tuk-tuk, or first-class flights) to shoot celebrities, shamans, refugees, guerillas, and musicians for national publications ranging from Rolling Stone to The New York Times.

In those days, given the constraints of celluloid film, pros like Borris and Monk (who often work together) would leave their shoots not knowing whether their work had been brilliant or they’d blown the assignment. As wild as their adventures were, both photographers said their greatest excitement often was getting home and waiting to see how their images emerged in the darkroom.

All that changed with digital photography, when results became instant, skill became secondary, and it seemed like anyone with an iPhone could take a decent shot. But speed and convenience don’t tend to produce works of fine craftsmanship. What we’ve gained in instant gratification we’ve largely lost in precision, to say nothing of the patience required to master anything that’s complicated or a challenge.

Back in the day, top photographers were forced to learn patience, as they waited for the right light, mood, and composition to tell a story beyond the surface snapshot or selfie. Then came the time that had to be spent in a darkroom, where photographers could make tiny adjustments, such as “dodging” and “burning” a negative to lighten or darken various elements. In describing this painstaking process, Borris liked to quote the great 20th-century photographer Ansel Adams, whom he studied with decades ago, before Adams died: “The negative is the equivalent of the composer’s score,” Adams said, “and the print is the performance.”

Where photographs used to be painstakingly crafted objects, now they’re more like ephemera—constructed of data, endlessly replicable and changeable, but often never actually existing in material space.

That’s why many serious photographers—à la Borris and Monk—are returning to older techniques to imbue their images with more mystery and more texture, the results of real craft. To revive those methods, they’re heading back in history to processes that were used as long ago as the 1860s. And the richly rendered images they’re making resemble digital photos as much as a Caravaggio painting looks like that snapshot you took of it in a dimly lit Italian church.

Monk feels the dissonance between the old and new every time he goes to work. “With digital,” he says, “I end up with thousands of photos on hard drives, most of which I throw away.” In a darkroom, however, the act of creation changes. “There’s something about making an actual physical object where no two are the same that’s a challenge. The other stuff I can do in my sleep.”

Now in their 60s, both Monk and Borris—friends for more than three decades—are pivoting from magazine and commercial work to fine art photography. (Full disclosure: I am definitely one of their fans. I have three of Monk’s crisp, edgy black-and-white portraits, and I’m saving wall space for Borris’s quieter, stunning landscapes, or one of his newer experiments with old methods called “tintypes.”)

So, when I suggested that we all travel to Cuernavaca to visit Casademunt (whom Monk admiringly calls a “mad scientist”), both photographers jumped on the idea. And Casademunt said he was happy to have us. “Saturno awaits,” he texted.

The Ways of Seeing

Soon after we arrived, Casademunt—a slightly disheveled, sinewy man in his 50s—took us back to what could be called his outdoor workshop: a garden overgrown with pink bougainvillea and crowded with toys, pots full of cotton plants, the ruins of ancient-looking stone columns, and a huge, antique, stand-up “street camera.”

Also in the yard was a trailer with a pop-up tent—like the one my family used to take camping in the American Southwest—with a big antique lens jutting out of the back. This, apparently, was Saturno—the “camera” that Casademunt carries with him when he roams ancient ruins and volcanoes, or takes photos right here in his backyard.

“Saturno is the titan of time,” he said. It is an apt name from a photographer whose abiding interest is to compress time into a single photograph. Casademunt has done that through long exposures that trace the sun from dawn to dusk over the Teotihuacan pyramids, and that capture lunar light at the Mayan palaces of Maya Puuc. Using a technique called spectrography, where exposures are overlaid on a piece of film, he has revealed phases of modern construction in a single image.

There’s a sense of history in Casademunt’s photographs, as well as a sense of the time between how the scene was captured, the moment a photo was taken, how it was revealed in the camera, and then how it ultimately emerged in the developing process.“What interests me is the journey of the photons,” Casademunt says. “There is a space between where you project the light and [where] the sensitized light receives it.”

By revealing what we can’t see in ordinary reality—shapes, flashes of ultraviolet light—antique photography has a kind of spiritual aspect. “Digital photography is practical,” Casademunt says. “But we’re looking for another, different representation of reality that we don’t know. That’s the whole point with Saturno, of being inside the camera.”

Casademunt is a naturalized Mexican, born in Spain. He started out as a journalist and staff photographer at a small magazine, but after five years became frustrated with its nonstop pace. “I couldn’t dedicate myself or delve deep into anything,” he said. “It felt like Uber Eats.”

In 1990 he got that chance for a deeper dive during a trip to Cuba, where he photographed musicians for “Son de Cuba,” his first of several photo books. He moved to Mexico, in 1994, and fell in love with the mystical and spiritual nature of the country—especially its archaeology (his photos have been displayed in the National Museum of Anthropology, among other exhibitions).

Casademunt isn’t the first photographer to fall hard for Mexico’s ruins. In the 1860s, itinerant photographers, such as the French explorer Désiré Charnay, took their cumbersome darkrooms to Mexican archeological sites that no one had known existed, creating a remarkable visual record of them before the sites were looted. Casademunt followed this tradition at Mayan ruins, “to finish the project [the itinerant photographers] started,” he says. He got permission from Mexico’s government to be the first to photograph the monuments at night. “No one had seen the moonlight on those stones.”

Daguerreotypes, the oldest kind of photos, had their heyday in the 1840s–60s. Those early photographers had to use sheets of copper coated with silver, polished to a mirror finish, and exposed them to light. But they were expensive to make. The resulting images were also delicate, blurry, and easily faded. Daguerreotypes were soon replaced, in the 1860s, by a newer methodology called “wet-plate collodion.” These photos were sharper and longer-lasting, with deeper and richer tones, but they required a very tricky process: preparing a tin or iron plate with light-sensitive chemicals, then exposing and developing the image while the plate was still wet. This forced photographers to rig up elaborate, portable darkrooms—much like Casadumunt’s Saturno. “Every step of the way, there’s 29 ways to mess it up,” said Borris.

The finickiness of wet-plate collodion techniques do have an unintended upside: “mistakes” tend to occur, often with interesting results. When the collodion doesn’t cover the whole plate, for instance, a bit of light can sneak in. The photographer Sally Mann calls these mistakes “angels of uncertainty.” Put another way, these mistakes are the traces of the artistic process. They leave a trail that documents the creation of the photo, as guided by the human hand, in a fashion that makes each piece unique.

“It’s otherworldly,” Borris said of the tintype process. “It adds mystery to everything. I love the color, the texture of the lacquered surface, and that each one of these images will never be the same.”

Sitting for the Ages

In his garden, Casademunt invited us, one at a time, into Saturno. “Your first time inside the camera is like entering a sacred space,” he said.

The interior of the tent was dominated by a metal stand for the photographic plate, which Casademunt had made himself, with trays for chemicals and a light-tight box on either side. With the lights out, I could see the upside-down and backwards image of Casademunt’s assistant (Luis Ortiz), on the plate holder, crisp and spooky.

One by one, Casademunt took our portraits. I posed as I imagined my ancestors had, serious and direct. Casademunt checked the light with a meter, went inside to see the image, then came back out to prepare the collodion plate.

To keep the chemicals from running, Casademunt put egg white on the edges of the plate, then poured the syrupy collodion mixture in the center, taking care to spread it evenly. Once he entered the tent, he asked me to resume my position, then rang a gong, telling me not to even breathe until the exposure was done. Then the gong rang again, giving the process a sense of ritual.

Afterward, still under a red light, Casademunt spread developer on the plate, then came outside to apply fixer and wash it in water. This was the magic moment, when my image began to appear. The process was amazing, but the image was a bit unnerving. I knew from the tintype portraits that Borris and Monk had made of themselves that the process exaggerates facial lines and makes subjects look older than they are. With my unsmiling ancestral pose, I looked like a tough and weary pioneer woman scanning the sky for a storm of locusts.

With wet-plate collodion photos, Mann once wrote, “There’s a certain sadness and depth that’s revealed in someone’s face… You know you’re sort of sitting for the ages.”

After taking portraits of Borris and Monk, Casademunt and Ortiz lacquered and dried the photos, then packaged them for us in a hand-printed black box. Casedemunt takes another photo of the portraits, but always gives his subjects the originals. “Many of my friends are painters,” he said, “and they’d give me something they’d worked on for weeks. I felt bad just giving them a print. Now that I work with unique pieces, they have a stronger power. They’re artifacts from the moment.”

Casademunt would soon take Saturno to Mexico City, where he set up in front of the Anahuacalli Museum for people to have their portraits taken. He’s also hoping to offer workshops on wet-plate photography.

Antennae for Energy We Can’t See

Before we left Casademunt’s house, I was drawn to two of the numerous ambrotypes displayed on a table. One was an image of a “Reina de la noche,” a cactus that blooms only once a year, at night; the photo captured a sense of history and immediacy in the exquisitely delicate flower. The other ambrotype showed an empty wooden chair, in a garden where fruit had fallen. The photo suggested disappearance, abundance, and time—you could get lost looking at it. It also resembled, in texture and feel, a tintype I found among family artifacts, of a photo of my great-grandfather’s empty chair—it was like a throughline to that past. The image’s otherworldly textures would have been impossible with a digital photo; its mystery and mojo would have been completely lost.

The photo reminded me of what Rene Torres, owner of the Torrente gallery in San Miguel de Allende, had told me when I bought that cactus field photo–that you can see so many layers of meaning in one ambrotype. “A digital photo tells one story,” said Torres, who is also a fine art photographer. “Wet-plate collodion photos tell you many stories. One is the image contained in the piece. Another is the construction of the piece itself.” Yet another layer of story is unintentional—those “accidents” beyond a photographer’s control. As Casademunt said regarding the photo of his that I bought, the cacti are like antennae for energy we can’t see.

There’s still one more sort of story you can see in an antique-type photo: a historical narrative. As Sally Mann once wrote, “I hope to make people stop and observe even the most mongrel, quiet, orphaned pieces of land, and remember that all of our land is death-inflected and blood-soaked.”

We left Casademunt’s magical garden and, the next morning, took the bus back—past the green mountains that surround Cuernavaca, through the endless traffic of Mexico City, to the cacti and cobblestones surrounding my home in San Miguel de Allende. A few days after arriving, I framed my new photos in boxes, like the multi-dimensional objects they are. I know I won’t get tired of looking at them, and neither will the people who inherit them after I’m gone. They too will wonder about the stories these photos tell, their mystery, and constantly see something new in them.