London Amara is pursuing large-format collodion wet plate photography, working on site in a portable darkroom to produce haunting images of the forests of Ohio, Florida, California, and British Columbia, and intimate portraits of her family and friends. Her silver gelatin and pigment prints are characterized by extraordinarily fine detail, rich earth tones, and the kinds of technical flaws that, while anathema to traditional studio photographers, underscore the work’s handcrafted, painterly sensibility. The peculiarities of the collodion method—invented in 1851 to replace the daguerreotype, requiring cumbersome equipment and patient processing—require a degree of patience unusual in the Instagram age. Inspired in part by the work of photographers Sally Mann and, to a lesser extent, Justine Kurland, Amara imparts both her landscapes and portrait shots with a melancholic romanticism born of nostalgic longing for her wild, outdoor childhood. All her subjects, whether animal or vegetable, are offered as representatives of an ancient wisdom, possessors of a unique sensitivity to the cycle of life, death, and decay that metropolitan living tends to suppress. So while these are images of lush beauty, they also have a moral component, reminding us of the planet’s fragility and of our critical role in its preservation.