Ryan Scheer is a photographer specializing in historic processes, including wet plate collodion (tintype), medium format, and large format photography. His work begins not with a camera, but with the construction of entire worlds.
Raised in the landscapes of rural Colorado ranches, where his imagination flourished, Scheer builds intricate dioramas and hand-sculpted figures that become the subjects of his photographs. Using a combination of fabricated elements and materials gathered from the land—dirt, weeds, and stone—he creates scenes that feel both intimate and expansive, like fragments of a place remembered rather than observed.
Photographed entirely in-camera using early processes, these environments take on the weight and texture of another time. The imperfections inherent to the medium—chemical marks, tonal shifts, and surface irregularities—give each image the presence of an artifact, as though it has been discovered rather than made.