In a gravel parking lot in Spokane’s Garland District, Britt Bradley huddles under a black cape. She’s preparing her camera for a portrait of Keva (roller derby name: Kevlar). Keva wears a black helmet and purple Lilac City Roller Derby tank top. They lean back against a brick wall and wait for Bradley to click the shutter.
“Don’t move,” Bradley tells Keva as she waits for a sign that the camera is ready, then triggers the camera to take the picture. “Perfect. Relax. Excellent job, Keva. I’m cutting you loose.”
Bradley then pulls a wet glass plate from the top of the camera and glides on her roller skates across the street to The Drinkery, a bar where she has parked her mobile studio. The interior is dark, other than light spilling through red windows at the top of the trailer. It reeks of chemicals. Bradley begins processing the plate to turn the image captured into a picture.
“It’s called wet plate collodion because the plate needs to stay wet throughout the whole process for the image to be viable. If it drys out the image is no good.” She said creating a picture takes several minutes from camera to dark room.
It’s a style of photography that goes back to about 1850.
“It’s the same process that was used in the Civil War,” she said. “Everybody looks a little uncomfortable. You have to sit very still because it’s a UV-sensitive process, not just light-sensitive. In a lot of those old-time studio photographs, everyone looks so uncomfortable because there was a metal spine and clamp holding their head still because the exposure was so long that you don’t want to get any movement. Luckily, we’re shooting outside today so the exposure time is only about one to a half a second. Still slow, but not awful.”
Once the process is finished, Bradley returns to modern photographic techniques. She doesn’t print the images, she digitizes them to add to her collection and send them to the women who pose for the pictures.
After processing Keva’s picture, she turns her attention to the next player, Megan (roller derby name: Megatron), who sits atop the fence that rings The Drinkery’s patio. As Bradley readies the camera, she makes conversation.
“How did you get your name, Megatron?”
“I played rugby in college. I played for Gonzaga and that was my name there, so I’ve been Megatron for a long time,” she said. She shares that she’s been playing roller derby for about two years.
Bradley climbs in under the black cape, finishes lining up the shot and asks Megan to hold the pose for a second. Then she snaps the shutter, checks the shot to see if it’s good and pulls the plate out to take it back to the darkroom to process it.
For the past two weeks, Bradley has taken her camera around the Northwest to capture images of roller derby squads from Bellingham to Bend. “Hopefully there will be a book and an exhibition,” she said. “The kickstarter for the book will launch in November.”
She fits right in with her subjects. Bradley wears shorts, knee pads and the black jersey of her home team in California. (roller derby name: Speedy) She believes that helps her as she interacts with these women.
“We have our own glossary of terms and we have our own language and we have our own jokes and so it’s really nice to be around somebody who kind of gets it,” she said.
After their sessions, Megan and Keva say they’re excited to see their individual and team photos and the finished book.
“This is such a unique opportunity to get a photo with so much personality in it,” Keva said. “It’s going to be amazing to see how they all turn out. I think it’s going to be awesome.”
After the shoot at The Drinkery, Bradley reconvened with the team at an evening practice session at a Spokane Valley roller rink. She says she still has a few more teams and states to visit before she finishes the book.
