by Chad Shryock
Do you remember your great grandparents? Unfortunately, many of us have vague memories, if any, of our elder family members once we go back far enough in our family tree. Parents and usually grandparents we can recall easily, but beyond that, it becomes pretty difficult. While it’s tragic that we may not even know our forebears’ names, in some ways it’s worse that the very likeness of these people is often lost to the ages. It is a rare treasure to find an image of someone in our family, because an image brings with it a connection that just knowing their name could never provide.
Photographs used to hold special significance, being cherished and passed down through generations as a way to remember where—or specifically, “who”—we came from. Today, each of us is a documentary photographer, always having a camera at the ready and turning the real world into pixels that can be easily manipulated through a filter, distorting who we really are. But as technology marches on, we risk losing these images due to obsolescence. Remember archiving data on floppy drives, CD-ROMs, or even your MySpace page? It doesn’t take long for these storage methods to be out of date, unsupported, or even worse—deleted. Hidden in dusty boxes scattered around your local antique store or maybe in your own closet, there are images that often show us what our ancestors really looked like, with few (but not necessarily “none”) photographic manipulations. It is difficult for us, as tech-savvy as we are, to comprehend that there once was a time when the photographic image didn’t exist.
There were some early attempts by the Frenchman Nicéphore Niépce using a bitumen substance as early as 1822 that somewhat produced an image, but it was really only good for landscapes due to the long exposure time. The resulting image was something that you could sort of make out, but it really didn’t have any amount of quality that would eventually be commonplace. But these early experiments were the birth of photography and even though the word didn’t exist yet, it set things in motion over the following decades.
A partner of Niépce named Louis Daguerre continued Niépce’s experimental work after his death in 1833 and eventually stumbled onto a process that would change forever how the world could be seen. You see, before 1839, there was really no such thing as photography as we know it. If you wanted to capture your likeness or that of someone in your family, you could turn to an artist that specialized in painting, sketching, or sculpting. The word “photograph” first appeared in 1839, being coined by English astronomer/mathematician Sir John Herschel, as a combination of the Greek words essentially meaning “drawing with light.” It had been known for some time that certain chemical compounds, especially those containing silver, reacted with light. But these chemical drawings were always fleeting and the secret of “fixing” an image so that it had some longevity, hadn’t been discovered yet.
Daguerre’s process was fairly complex – it needed a sheet of copper that was plated in silver and polished to a mirror-like finish. This “plate” was then sensitized in a darkroom with iodine and placed into a plateholder that allowed the unexposed plate to be inserted into the back of a camera. The image was exposed, initially requiring a few minutes, and then the plate was taken back to the darkroom where the image was developed by holding it above a small pot of boiling mercury. Not exactly the safest environment for a photographer, but the resulting images were spectacular in their detail. Finally, there was a method to create portraits of people and the images looked just like the real world – albeit without color. With Daguerre being a businessman, he named the resulting images after himself and they became known as “Daguerreotypes.”
Around the same time others were using silver chloride to create images first on a sensitized sheet of paper that would be known as a “negative.” This process then required the negative to be exposed on top of another sensitized sheet to create a positive. And while this method was far less complex and relatively inexpensive, the resulting images had an artistic softness to them that didn’t quite reflect reality the way that the Daguerreotype did. Technology marched on through the 1840s with advancements in camera lenses but these early photographic processes were still expensive for most people or just didn’t provide the image quality that was expected using paper positives.
Towards the end of the 1840s, there was a new photographic process that was taking shape and it started with an English sculptor and a new chemical substance called collodion. Frederick Scott Archer lived outside of London and was a relatively known sculptor in his day. He too was interested in photography and had begun experimenting with a salted collodion solution. A mixture of alcohol, ether, and guncotton, Archer devised that collodion could be poured onto a glass plate, sensitized in a bath of silver nitrate and then exposed in a camera. He made his process available to the world in an article published in 1851. What was so special about this discovery was that Archer gave the process details as a gift to the world, failing to patent or obtain any licensing for using his process. Eventually called the Wetplate Collodion Process, this new method of creating images combined the best aspects of the previous methods. Having similar detail to a daguerreotype, the reproducibility of the paper negative process, Archer initially used the method to create images on glass called ambrotypes. These images, similar to the daguerreotype, needed to be protected from handling and be housed in a small case which prevented the silver image from becoming tarnished due to exposure to oxygen in the air. During the mid-1850s, a new material was produced for the wetplate process that negated the need for the airtight cases and finally made the process available to anyone that wanted their photograph taken.
Originally called the melainotypes or ferrotypes, these images used a thin steel sheet that was coated with asphalt or machine oil and baked to produce a deep, chocolate-black background. The collodion process creates molecular level crystals of silver where exposed to light and the dark background of the initial plate provided a contrast to the silvery image. To protect the image, a layer of varnish was poured across the plate, creating a barrier between silver and air, allowing the creation of very long-lasting images. As the popularity of the ferrotype grew, it became cheaper and cheaper to create these images to the point that they were renamed as “tintypes” even though they were never made of metallic tin. In the vernacular of the day, “tin” was a word that meant something cheap, inexpensive, and easy to obtain—which surely fit the photographs that were being taken at this time. Photography was finally made available to the common person at a price that most could afford. Available in many sizes and prices, the tintype exploded in popularity especially during the period of the U.S. Civil War. Soldiers lined up to send images of themselves and their new uniforms back to their loved ones at home. What’s fantastic is that many of these images still exist and if they were properly protected from the elements, look the same today as when they were first created.
And while the age of the tintype photograph extended into the mid-1880s, it was nearly driven to extinction after the Kodak Brownie camera was released. Being an all-chemical process and requiring a darkroom to process the images, collodion required an expertise not readily available to the common person. The Brownie camera, on the other hand, was preloaded with a roll of film and required the user to only press the button to take a snapshot. Relegated to a carnival novelty in the early twentieth century, it nearly died off and was almost forgotten but for a few inquisitive photographers who rediscovered the process in the late 1970s. With much of the hands-on knowledge of the process gone, it took a new breed of photographic explorers to dig through old books and notes to decipher not only the chemicals used in the original process and their modern-day equivalents, but the specific techniques needed to create these unique images.
In the age of Instagram and TikTok, it has become a niche style of photography where social media consumers stumble across #tintype and are suddenly made aware that images can exist in a physical form. As they go deeper down the rabbit hole of this form of historical photography, they discover that active practitioners are few and far between. There are estimated to be just over 1,000 people in the world today who know how to create a tintype image and fewer that continue to use the process with some frequency. There is likely someone within an hour or two of most people, but unless you know that the word “tintype” exists, tracking down a photographer can be difficult.
So go online and scour social media for the word ‘tintype’ to get a better feel for the longevity of these images. Ask your relatives if any tintypes exist of your family and proudly put them on display in your home. And finally, seek out a photographer that can help you create a physical photograph that doesn’t need a digital device to view and pass it down as a treasured heirloom in your family.
At Porkpie Photography, we bring back the art of preserving memories with our unique portrait sessions, creating tintypes using the wetplate collodion process. These archival-quality images have set the precedent for both quality and longevity. The image created is composed of crystals of silver at the molecular level, providing incredible detail. The image is essentially silver and as long as it is properly sealed with a coating of varnish, it should look the same in 100 years as it does today.
Can you say that about your iPhone photos?
