Demetrios Mina with his ambrotype plates takes us on a time-travel journey back to the 19th century, using the wet plate collodion method which was introduced in the 1850’s, but at the same time he renegotiates and reclaims the narratives and connotations associated with the practise. At the time of the invention of ambrotype cameras, they were associated with the high, privileged classes, because only them could afford their costly prices. Mina consciously avoids repeating that trope, creating the camera on his own from scratch. This is a very complicated process for an artist who wants to be self-sufficient and master the whole process, especially for the creation of the largest ambrotype camera of the world, with which he developed an almost life-sized photograph (and was recognized by Guinness). Mina’s works have an ‘aura’, reminiscent of Walter Benjamin’s theory in ‘The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction’ where he argued that original artworks radiate a special energy from the fact that they are unreproducible and singular. None of Mina’s photographs can ever be repeated, capturing a moment in time that will never exist again, on the glass material that reminds us once more how fragile and delicate those artworks are. Roland Barthes was talking about analogue photography in his “Camera Lucida”, but his words could perfectly accompany Mina’s work: “From a real body, which was there, proceed radiations which ultimately touch me, who am here; the duration of the transmission is insignificant; the photograph of the missing being, as Sontag says, will touch me like the delayed rays of a star.”