8 x 10in image with 50 x 55 border

Original Wet Plate Ambrotype (Glass)

Blackwood Frame

These silver gelatin prints are drawn from No Word for Black and White (2019), a series exploring the illusion of separation between human beings and the natural world. Created using a 160-year-old camera and the wet plate collodion process from 1851, each image is shaped through light, chemistry, and time, drawing out an intrinsic level of detail that accentuates the quiet beauty of the subject. There is also a play and spontaneity within the chemical process; much like nature itself, no two outcomes are ever the same. Every mark, every detail is unique, and embraced in its beauty and imperfection. 

This body of work is informed by a growing awareness that we are not separate from the land, but intrinsically part of it. Through learning from Indigenous Australian perspectives, I have begun to understand a deeper connection to Country, one that is felt rather than observed. 

These works invite a slowing down, encouraging us to move in harmony with the natural world, not against it, and to recognise the profound interconnectedness that binds us all. 

Renate Rienmüller is a Sydney-based photomedia artist whose practice centres on analogue portraiture and historic photographic processes. She completed a Bachelor of Fine Arts at UNSW Art & Design in 2013 and an Honours degree in Photography at Sydney College of the Arts in 2015. Renate has exhibited across Sydney and regional NSW and has undertaken international artist residencies in Italy and Poland.

In 2015, she established a darkroom in Brookvale on Sydney’s Northern Beaches, where she began working extensively with nineteenth-century wet plate collodion photography. This marked a sustained focus on portraiture and the relational exchange between artist and sitter. Drawn to traditional analogue methods, her work embraces materiality, slowness, and presence within the image-making process.

Her ongoing portrait series, The Artist Lens, spans over a decade and will be published in 2027 as a photographic portrait book.