Anselm Wether

Ambrose & Wether is the pseudonymous partnership of a photographer and a writer.
As a sideline to their established and better-known work, in 2011 the two began
collaborating on a series of erotic tintypes shot entirely in wet-plate collodion with an
Eastman View Camera No. 2-D, a large-format camera dating to the 1920s.

Unfulfilled Desires is in part an homage to early-twentieth-century commercial and
vernacular erotica, the studio work of Yva Richard and Ernst Schertel. It follows in the
much darker shadow of Joel-Peter Witkin. And of course there is a sexual purpose
here—we intend to arouse and titillate. But Unfulfilled Desires also contemplates the
nature of contemporary longing, the idea of fetish as Walter Benjamin understood it,
as a displacement of organic by inorganic desire, and the fate of the one-of-a-kind and
unique within a familiar and longer running narrative of mechanical reproduction, its
modern rise and more recent collapse.

As a series of erotic objects, these photographs tempt a deeper longing to consume
and to connect ourselves in an image world of absent people, events and places.  They
feed an unfulfilled desire which grew in tandem with photography, and which has only
increased with modern visual stimulation, with ephemeral overabundance and easy
digital consumption.

Perhaps, in truth, we are creating relics, potent visual and tactile objects, irreproducible
handwork in an era of digital photography.  At a time when objects give way to
disembodied abstracted images and stored information, each photograph here is a
unique, direct positive image on metal.  Each object was present with its subject at its
creation. Each tintype promises something more than simply an image. But these are
only photographs. An erotic world once removed. Real and imagined sexuality.
Arousing. Desire unfulfilled.

They can be reached by email at ambroseandwether@gmail.com