I think I first fell in love with the modern way of making "old-time" tintype photographs when I saw the work of Chuck Close. But if you don’t know what a tintype picture is, think of those pictures of outlaws like Billy the Kid that crop up in documentaries and movies: now you’re thinking of something that looks like a tintype.
Its rough edges, uneven focus - they were new to me. But it was the tone, the texture of the image - that it felt like looking into the past but also into an unreal, dream-like alien reality - that's what sealed the deal. I wanted to somehow be involved in that.
Of course, being a successful artist with access to the actual equipment you need to create a real tintype image was one thing; doing it myself was something else. For a time, I was happy enough to be able to work with a Tintype app. It creates images that looks like this:
Then I read about Luminar, the photo-editing software, and how they also have a set of tintype-style filters. From that, I got more control, and photos like this:
There’s a paper to be written on why, At This Point in Our History, we are reverting to older technologies. Historians can ponder on how – and if – we can learn anything from the present when we are making our photos – and our videos – looks so much like we’re in the past. Why, when we now have pristine, crystal-clear moving images that can be created right in our hands, do we want something that looks like it was shot on Super 8 film, for example?
One year, my Xmas present to myself was to have a proper tintype photo taken with my wife. There's a place in Austin TX that does it, because of course there is.
Finding the place turned out to be a little tricky. On Google Maps, it looked to be behind a fancy restaurant. When we got there, it turned out to be in the grounds of a fancy restaurant. When you have a cool camera, you make sure you have a similarly cool camera bag in which to keep it. If your camera is the size of a medium-sized person, then you need something a little larger. And this is why we found ourselves standing outside an actual caravan, of the kind that might in years gone by have been the home of a fortune teller or a circus performer.
Inside the caravan, maybe 75% of the space was mostly empty: tintype photos decorated the walls, a tiny little desk sat in the corner, and then there was the camera. I couldn’t take my eyes off the camera. It was mostly tripod, but the machine itself was a heavy-looking plate holder attached to a lens by means of rubber bellows that concertinaed up and down to help focus the whole thing.
I wanted one. I looked them up on eBay while we were standing there.
But then a small door at the far end opened and the photographer stepped out, accompanied by the kind of smell that reminded me of my childhood, when my ma was dying her hair with some god-awful chemical mixture, except this one was maybe ten-times as strong and possibly mixed with a year’s worth of cat pee. It was pretty bad. The guy was wearing what looked like a heavy-duty dust mask. If he’d been wearing a full WWII gas mask, I wouldn’t have blamed him.
It took 5 or 10 minutes to set everything up for the shot. He placed us in front of a blank background, then added a small step for my teeny-tiny wife to stand on. “Am I taller than him now?” she asked, hopefully. He looked up to quickly check.
“Um, no,” he said.
After we were in position, he added a reflector the size of a small surfboard under our chins and an external flash the size of a small star a little way away.
Now, this is the time to talk about what is apparently the big question when being photographed like this: to smile or not to smile? Of course, it’s a picture, so we’re supposed to smile, right? But in them-olden-days, people didn’t smile. And so, whether deliberately or through some kind of communal memory, people tend not to smile when they have their picture taken with a tintype now. I wasn’t sure what I was going to do. I didn’t know how long we would have to hold our pose – was it going to be for a long time? If so, then I wasn’t going to smile. A smile held for more than a couple of second looks like something weird and terrifying when committed to film (or metal plate).
“I’m going to count down from three,” the photographer said. And he did. At “1” he took the picture. And, if you’re familiar with what it feels like when a small sun goes supernova three feet from your head, then you’ll know what it felt like when that flash went off.
“Wow,” my wife and I said in unison, when we really meant, “Argh, our faces are melting!”
“That why I don’t like to mention it,” the photographer said. “I like it to be a surprise.” Cute.
He took the metal sheet with the image now imprinted on it out of the back of the camera and into the poisonous dark room. After two minutes, he came out with the sheet in a small tub. He was rinsing it with water from a mug. We watched as the black surface slowly formed into a negative and then a positive image of my wife and a strange-looking man standing beside her.
It seemed like magic happening as we watched. It was just what I wanted.
We wandered east Austin for an hour while the image dried and the rest of the magic chemistry stuff happened. The feeling reminded me of the time I got my first tattoo. I loved the whole experience and couldn’t wait to get another one. But, I’d have to save up. Old-time art doesn’t come cheap.
As I put it into a frame the next day and hung it on a wall in what we liked to call our “reading parlor”, it felt more than worth it. As I get older, I find that things are less interesting than experiences. Experiences are where I would most like to spend my money. And there, hanging on the wall, was a thing that reminds me of one of the most interesting experiences I’ve had in Austin. Worth every cent.
For my son’s twenty-first birthday, we bought him a photo session. Not because he necessarily wanted the photo - but I did. And isn’t that what other people’s birthdays are about?
The experience was more or less the same, except this time we knew what to expect. And we didn’t warn him in any way.
He was placed in the necessary position, a bright light (but not the brightest light…yet) was shone directly at him. A hammock of a light reflector between him and the camera.
“Should we tell him?” my wife whispered.
“Obviously not,” I said. As the buyer of the photo, I had a right to enjoy the experience. And by enjoy, I of course mean, watch in delight as my child gets a show he was not expecting.
As the photographer took the photo, the flash exploded in a most satisfying way (from our perspective). As everyone’s eyesight came back, my son was standing there, looking so much like the proverbial rabbit in headlights.
Again, as the photographer used a small mug to splash water over the image, I was struck by how much like actual magic it felt: from a blank rectangle to a beautiful image of my child. And again, he’d somehow chosen not to smile. After all, Billy the Kid was not grinning into the camera; Great Grandma was not saying CHEESE while the kids were making rabbit ears behind her head. Tintypes are somber…they are serious.
Or maybe it’s just because someone has unexpectedly exploded a light grenade in front of your face.
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