It started in 1988. I was 14, holding a small point-and-shoot film camera, with absolutely no idea I'd still be doing this — in some form or another — nearly four decades later.
What followed were hundreds of rolls of film through teenage. Few landscapes, some street scenes — but a lot of people. I was hooked on portraits before I even had language for why. It was the connection. The conversation before the shutter clicks. The way someone's face changes the moment they stop posing and start actually being present with you. I was chasing that, roll after roll, long before I understood what I was chasing.
Digital came along in the early 2000s, I adopted it. But — and this will surprise no one who's met me — I never actually let go of film. While the rest of the world was busy being thrilled about megapixels, I was falling deeper down a different rabbit hole: medium format, large format, developing my own negatives, then silver gelatin printing in a darkroom that smelled equally of chemistry and obsession.
That rabbit hole had a bottom, and it turned out to be Platinum Palladium.
About PV — Austin, TX Portrait Photographer
I still remember the first time I pulled a Platinum print and just stood there looking at it. It wasn't just the image — it was the tonality. The texture. The strange, almost organic way the print felt more like an object than a photograph. And underneath all of that, the permanence — the knowledge that this print, made with metal instead of ink, wasn't going anywhere. Not in my lifetime, not in my grandchildren's. That combination — portraiture and permanence — is where Posterity Portraiture was born. This website is really just the vehicle for an idea I'd been circling for years without knowing it.
Now, I'll be the first to admit — platinum palladium is a black-and-white process, and monochrome isn't everyone's cup of tea (though it should be, but I'm biased). So the studio also works in Carbon Transfer and archival pigment printing on cotton rag paper, for clients who want color — without giving up an ounce of that same permanence. Different processes, same obsession.
