Shaun Stewart | Black Hand Alchemy Company

ETX Uncovered · Kilgore, TX · Published June 20, 2026

"Leave everything you know about photography at the door."

Tintype by Shaun Stewart. John Coffer (right) and Shaun Stewart (left), Coffer's homestead, upstate New York.

That's what John Coffer told Shaun when he showed up at a hand-built cabin in upstate New York to learn wet plate collodion photography. By then Shaun had already spent decades behind cameras — film, digital, large and medium format — but Coffer wasn't interested in any of it. Light meters wouldn't help him here. None of the old rules would. The only thing Shaun was allowed to keep was how to frame a shot. Everything else stayed at the door.

I didn't understand how much that one sentence explained until I sat in front of Shaun's camera myself.

I'm sitting in a carved Victorian chair while Shaun aims a large format camera at my face, and the first thing I notice is how long it takes. There is no click. He bends to the ground glass and turns a brass knob, then another, easing the lens forward a hair at a time, finding my face where it hangs upside down and backwards. He gets me sharp — and then, instead of taking the picture, we leave. The plate has to be sensitized: the collodion poured by hand, drained so it won't ripple, sensitized in silver nitrate, all of it racing a clock that starts the moment it's wet.

When he comes back I sit again. Chin up. Shoulders back. Neck forward like a turtle. "It feels weird," he says, "but it looks better." The plate slides into the back of the camera, the dark slide comes out, and for a few seconds I'm not allowed to move at all. A flash bright enough to come with a warning — and then nothing. No image. Just the light, and the plate carried off to the darkroom.

His business is called Black Hand Alchemy Company, and he uses a 1912 Gundlach Korona to create the historical wet plate collodion process from the 1850s — tintypes and ambrotypes made one at a time on metal and glass, in a process most people assumed died a century ago. He lives with his wife Tracy and three rescue dogs in a 1938 house with a historical marker out front, tucked into Kilgore's Historic Meadowbrook neighborhood, the city's only designated historic district. There is no digital file at the end of what he does. There is no negative. There is one object, and it is the only one of its kind that will ever exist.

When the plate finally comes up out of the chemistry, the fixer washing over it until a face slowly emerges from the cloudiness, Shaun calls it the magic moment. He says that’s his favorite part, and I understood why when I saw my own face surface out of the blackness. The image felt oddly familiar. Not because it looked exactly like me, but because it didn't seem interested in the version of me I usually see in photographs. For a second, I understood why people once thought cameras could steal your soul. Magic.

Going Backwards

Shaun has been making pictures since he was seventeen, when his dad handed him a used Pentax K1000, a camera so stubbornly mechanical he once dropped it in a creek, dried it with a hair dryer, swapped the battery, and kept shooting. For decades he worked the way most photographers do now: shoot a thousand frames, cull to five, move on.

Then, about two years ago, the digital camera he'd had since the early 2000s gave up for good. Faced with the choice of dropping a couple grand on a new one, he did something stranger. He went backward.

He looked at daguerreotypes first and backed away when he realized the old process meant boiling mercury and breathing the fumes, and as he puts it, his wife wouldn't have been thrilled about that in the house. So he kept searching, found tintypes, and fell down the rabbit hole. A handful of photographers in Texas still practice the craft, but every one of them told him the same thing: if he wanted to learn it, he needed a teacher. The process is too nuanced to pick up from videos alone. 

Their advice eventually led him to John Coffer, the man Shaun calls "the OG"—the photographer widely credited with bringing wet plate collodion back from the dead. Coffer lives in a hand-built cabin in upstate New York, accepts only four students a year, and can only be reached by letter. When Shaun got accepted, he went. 

I was surprised by how recent all of this is. He came home, failed for months until it clicked, and started selling work in June of last year. The whole craft, the camera, the chemistry, the gallery representation, the museum commissions, is barely a year old.

The reason he chose it, the reason that survives all the trial and error, is the thing I felt from the chair: the process refuses to be hurried. He pours each plate by hand, sensitizes it in silver nitrate, and loads it blind — and the whole thing has to be exposed and developed within about ten minutes, which is why he hauls his darkroom everywhere he goes, a black box he climbs into to work by the red glow of a lamp. You cannot rush the chemicals. 

Almost none of the gear for a dead process can be bought, so Shaun has it made however it gets made. A woodworker in Henderson built the dark box; a seamstress sewed its light-tight cloth. The plate holder he loads in the field is 3D-printed — a CNC-age part feeding a hundred-and-seventy-year-old chemistry, and he sees no contradiction in that. He doesn't care whether a tool is old or new. He cares whether it's honest.

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“It is what it is." You accept the results.

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Wet plate collodion is sensitive to ultraviolet light, which means color behaves in ways that look wrong until you understand what's happening. Reds and oranges go dark. Blues go pale. Freckles surface where you never knew they were, and UV sunscreen can read like streaks of paint. Shaun showed me a portrait of his next-door neighbor, a man with a beard so red it goes copper in the sun. On the plate, the beard came out black and his blue eyes turned almost white. At first it looks like distortion. Then you realize it's doing exactly what it's meant to: the plate isn't lying, it's just paying attention to a part of reality our eyes aren't built to catch. It also means some of what we think we know about the faces of the past may be slightly off — beards a different shade, eyes a different lightness than the people actually wore.

Tintype by Shaun Stewart. His next-door neighbor.

Standing there, looking at plates scattered across the room, I caught myself wondering how much of the world we take for true simply because it's familiar. How many things look the way we think they do only because our eyes happen to see them that way? The thought felt larger than photography. 

Then again, so does Shaun. Officially he's a photographer. Unofficially he's a teacher, a historian, a collector, a researcher — a man who can spend twenty minutes explaining why a blue eye goes white on a tintype and somehow make you care. He clearly loves all of it: the questions, the process, the failures as much as the successes. Barely a year into the craft, he's already running demonstrations, shooting historical reenactments, working with museums, and walking curious people like me through a process most of us assumed vanished a century ago.

A Well-Kept House 

Walking through the house, I kept noticing that almost everything in it is a marker for something. Two portraits, Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt, share a wall with a length of patriotic bunting. A throw pillow quotes Cicero — a room without books is like a body without a soul — and the books behind it run from his cookbooks to her novels, sorted clearly by whose is whose. An old wooden printer's tray hangs as a shadowbox, every little compartment holding something that marks a moment: a six of hearts from the target he shot at sixteen, the first time he ever fired a black-powder rifle at scout camp; a fragment of shingle from the Oak Cliff gas station Clyde Barrow's family once owned; his father's things.

Some of the plates on the wall aren't even Shaun's own work — they're a friend's old family photographs, handed over with a shrug of I don't want these, you can  have them, and Shaun kept them, because keeping is what he does.

He pulled the original deed to the house, the one from 1938, and traced every owner who ever held it, only a small handful in nearly ninety years. He still writes John Coffer a letter about once a month, by hand, because that's still the only way to reach the man, and because Shaun is the kind of person who keeps a correspondence going the slow way when the slow way is the real way. Even the dogs fit: all three are rescues, all three came from rough beginnings, all three were kept and loved into the gentle animals nosing around the studio now. The medium itself is the same instinct turned into chemistry — one unrepeatable object, no copies, no negative, the opposite of a feed you scroll past. A thing you hold in your hand and don't throw away.

Provenance

The process Shaun practices was patented in 1851 by an Englishman named Frederick Scott Archer. Archer could have made a fortune from it. Instead he declared it a scientific advance that everyone should be free to use, took no royalties, and died penniless.

I keep setting that next to the conversation we had about artificial intelligence, because the contrast is the whole point. Shaun isn't a man raging against technology. He uses AI himself, to summarize research for his day job. What bothers him is people claiming what isn't theirs. Slapping I made this on something they didn't make. Erasing where a thing came from. His objection isn't to the tool; it's to the theft of provenance.

That's the line running through all of it — the kept photographs, the traced deed, the monthly letters, and the silver that gives Black Hand Alchemy Company its name. Silver nitrate darkens on contact with light, staining dark and not letting go for weeks. It’s the source of the old "black paws" of the trade, and the namesake of his work. He's built a whole life around a craft founded by a man who gave his name away, in deliberate contrast to a culture that takes credit and buries the source. Shaun isn't anti-progress. He's pro-provenance. He keeps the receipts because the receipts are the point.

Why I Interviewed Shaun

I found Black Hand Alchemy Company the way most people probably do, by accident, going down my own rabbit hole. I'd seen a plate somewhere on Facebook months earlier and couldn't shake it.

What I didn't expect was to end up in the chair myself — to feel, from the other side of the lens, how completely the process takes over the room and everyone in it.

Tintype by Shaun Stewart. Tracy, his wife and frequent subject.

What I also didn't expect was to find two people so completely at ease with who they are — building a life out of history and art and three rescue dogs, in a home older than almost anything around it, keeping the things that mark where they've been. Shaun is meticulous to the point of frustrating himself, and Tracy will tell you so while she sits patiently under a sheet of cheesecloth being his test subject for the hundredth time. They're best friends. You can feel it in the room.

I came for a forty-five-minute interview. I left two and a half hours later, and I hadn't noticed any of it pass. Somewhere between the camera, the chemistry, the stories, and the plates emerging from the fixer, I stopped keeping track. The slowing down Shaun talks about isn't really about moving slower. It's about paying attention long enough that time stops announcing itself.

ETX Uncovered exists to highlight the people in East Texas doing meaningful, often unseen work, the ones worth slowing down for. Shaun went backward on purpose, into a craft most of the world forgot, and made something nobody else around here is making.

Know someone in East Texas building something worth a closer look? I'd love to hear about them.

Shaun is the photographer behind Black Hand Alchemy, making wet plate tintypes and ambrotypes on location and by commission across East Texas. All tintype images in this piece are courtesy of and copyright to Shaun Stewart, used with permission. Find him in the ETX Discovered directory or reach him through his website. He may or may not respond if you mail him a letter.