Gary Briechle: Photographs gathers work made on the rocky coast of Maine, where the New Jersey-born photographer (born 1955) turned his camera on the individuals who constitute, in the publisher’s phrasing, his stand-in family. The portraits are not casual encounters: Briechle has forged long-term relationships with the people he has photographed since moving to Maine nearly twenty years ago. The book’s longest-running example is Arizona, whom he describes photographing since she was one year old and who was eight at the sitting quoted by the publisher.

The method is wet-plate collodion, a nineteenth-century process requiring the plate to be coated, exposed, and developed before it dries. Briechle’s own account describes taping a black Walmart sheet to the house, setting the camera on a tripod, and getting Arizona to lean back with shoulders touching to steady herself. As he poured fixer over the glass, an image appeared out of a swirl of watery blue-green—one he had never seen before, despite having done this countless times. The settings are plain; the process is slow and physical.

Twin Palms Publishers issued the volume in November 2012. The publisher and distributor records describe a hardcover book of 96 pages with 66 duotone plates, measuring 10 x 12 inches. The photographer is the sole credited contributor named in the publication’s record; no separate essayist, editor, or text author appears in the available sources.

The book therefore stands on Briechle’s own photographs and his brief account of their making. For readers interested in contemporary portraiture and in work made with historic photographic processes, the Maine pictures document sustained relationships between photographer and sitter, produced in a medium that resists speed and spontaneity. It is a book about proximity, not distance.