Tammy Mullins, St. Gabriel, Louisiana 2 - 2001

This is Deborah Luster’s “Tammy Mullins, St. Gabriel, Louisiana,” and it looks like it was captured using the wet plate collodion process. Can you imagine the artist preparing the plate, carefully coating it, and then the quiet focus just before taking the shot? The sepia tones give the image a timeless quality, a kind of haunting beauty, while Tammy's masked face looks both ancient and otherworldly. It makes me think about ritual, about transformation. I wonder what Tammy was thinking? What led her to this moment, this pose? It’s as if the artist has captured a fleeting moment, making me wonder if it’s staged, or spontaneous. There's something so powerful about the directness of this process, it's a reminder that artists are always building on what came before, finding new ways to see and express the world around them. Each artist creates their own form of embodied expression.