About this little venture…
As a self-taught tintype photographer, I observe the world upside-down through a worn-out set of ruby tinted camera bellows. Focusing dreamy ground glass reflections of faces beaming through a historical piece of patina covered brass from nearly two centuries ago wasn’t exactly what I had in mind as a profession growing up. Yet, it oddly feels premeditated. Inadvertently knocking over a mysterious box while organizing my Great Grandmother’s closet one afternoon revealed more than what I bargained for and an obsession I couldn’t shake. A stack of family post-mortem photographs dating from only-god-knows-when in the 1800s to the 1980s was seared into the back of my mind. This wasn’t something a teenager should see and it certainly isn’t something I thought would influence me today. I could never forget that moment being fixated on something so macabre, personal, and tangible. This was the catalyst that sparked my obsession with 19th-century photography because quite frankly, I felt there was something more permanent about it.
Tintypes convey a subject’s personality of the moment and I chose to go back in time to explore the forgotten ways of “19th-century alchemy,” as photographers of the past were mixing chemistry from scratch and most were marked by dark stains on their hands from the accidental introduction of silver nitrate. With the precarious and volatile nature of this process, I was sold the minute I captured my first image with silver after many mistakes. This fueled my desire to revive this method fully and bring it back into a society where filtered digital portrait photography has grown weary to me. Despite their lack of modern electrical components, all of my large format cameras are dubbed as my “memory machines,” being made of only glass, leather, brass, and wood.
Tintype, also known as wet-plate collodion photography, is a timely and sensitive process that uses silver and collodion to capture a one-of-a-kind portrait that can't be physically duplicated. The best way to describe tintype would be an 1850s silver polaroid on a metal plate. Each image is produced on the spot by hand – pouring the collodion onto the plate, exposing, developing, and fixing the image - with the final result being a beautiful archival photograph that is family heirloom-worthy. Shooting with a range of authentic antique equipment predating the civil war, I aim to capture the present making it timeless through silver and light.
-Sheena Dorton