Jamnesia: The Alternative Art of Athleticism

Jamnesia explores endurance and queer presence through monumental wet plate collodion portraits of roller derby athletes, examining how bodies persist, fail, and construct power within a culture built on impact and collective belonging.

Nitrate Fox is the large-format wet plate collodion practice of California-based artist Britt Bradley and the foundation of her monograph Jamnesia: The Alternative Art of Athleticism. The book documents the first phase of an ongoing series exploring roller derby through monumental tintype portraiture, produced on-site across the Western United States using a mobile darkroom.

Created between 2022 and 2025, Jamnesia examines how women and queer athletes construct power outside the male gaze. Rather than documenting the spectacle of the sport, the project isolates and monumentalizes its participants, positioning athletic bodies within a photographic lineage historically shaped by male authority. The wet plate collodion process—an exacting nineteenth-century technique requiring each plate to be developed while still wet—introduces material risk, physical labor, and surface density that resists polish and spectacle.

The monograph functions as both visual archive and conceptual intervention. Through scale, collaboration, and historical process, Jamnesia reframes roller derby not as entertainment, but as a site of collective authorship, endurance, and self-determined presence.