Farid Laid is a self-taught photographer based in Zurich whose work centers on the collodion wet plate process: a photographic method dating to 1851 that he has spent years mastering, making him one of the few practitioners of the technique in Switzerland.
The Flora and Fauna of Farid Laid is built entirely around this process. Each image begins not with a click of a shutter but with a series of deliberate material preparations: glass or metal plates polished by hand, coated in collodion, sensitized in silver nitrate, and exposed while still wet. The cameras themselves are wooden, some over a century old, fitted with brass lenses that predate the photographs they help create. The emulsion reacts to ultraviolet light rather than light intensity alone, inverting the warmth of organic matter — flowers, fur, feathers — into deep blacks and luminous whites. A lemon becomes the darkest thing in the frame.
The work draws directly from the natural world. Plants, animals, and organic forms are recurring subjects, chosen in part for how the process transforms them. Color becomes tone. Texture becomes surface. What might otherwise read as documentary becomes something closer to specimen and elegy.
Farid fixes each finished plate with shellac or sandarac resin and, for ambrotypes, seals the image beneath a layer of liquid asphalt — a final step that deepens the blacks and preserves the image against time. The result is a photograph that carries its own history in its surface.
He began working in this method in 2019 and has not stopped since.
Follow Farid:
Instagram: www.instagram.com/argentum_on_glass
