Making tintypes has been on my photographic bucket list every since I was a kid. The magical alchemy of the antiquated wet plate process appealed to my fascination with nostalgia while the ghostly aesthetic of the scarred images with their unique and inimitable imperfections spoke to my inner demons. To a child of the polaroid era who came into her own photographically in the digital era, the tintype was complex and inaccessible with it’s unwieldy large-format camera and impenetrable chemistry. The dream of making tintypes taunted me for years, a testament to all my technical failings as a photographer.

The reality could not be farther from the truth. In fact, it was the invention of the tintype process democratized photographic portraiture in the mid-19th century. Affordable and accessible, portable and durable, the tintype was a low-cost and popular alternative to the daguerrotype and albumen print. In fact, some have argued that the tintype was the ancestor of the disposable digital portrait. (Kasher, Steven, editor, America and the Tintype. New York: International Center of Photography; Gottingen: Steidl, 2008.)

I finally made my first tintypes in the summer of 2019 at Idyllwild Arts Academy. I came back to Los Angeles with the bug and soon found myself in the studio again with some help from Modern Tintype and UV Photographics. The wet plate process provide a marvelous antidote to almost every aspect of the digital process. Messy and tactile, methodical and time-consuming with exposures measured in seconds even minutes, it is riddled with imprecision and ruled by guesswork. You only have one shot per plate but with a bit of luck, you can create an eerily beautiful, one-of-a-kind image.