Mod Tintypes
One wild and precious life by Keliy Anderson-Staley
Tintype photos are an obsolete form of photography. The technology’s heyday was in the 19th century and tintypes apparently died out as a common photographic practice in the USA in the 1930s. A tintype was a direct positive image on a thin piece of coated metal. Because this type of photography was obviated by technological improvements, nearly everyone who had their portrait taken on a tintype is dead now.
But old technologies of art-making never completely die. Sculptors still employ bronze foundries, five thousand years after the invention of bronze. Tintypes, especially tintype portraits, have a special quality that other forms of photography don’t have. The images are black-and-white, but the flesh of the subject of a tintype photo seems to radiate somehow. The highlights on a sitter’s skin feel as if they are floating slightly above the picture plane.
Keliy Anderson-Staley is a Houston photographer who specializes in tintype portraits (but not exclusively portraits, as you can see from her website). When I look at a photo like Taylor, I see a young woman in centemporary dress posing in a time machine that has sent her back over a hundred years. The contrast of antique and contemporary is thrilling.
A community of any size needs portrait makers, obviously. While most are performing a service (photographing students for a High School yearbook, for example), at least some of producing portraits as artworks, as Anderson-Staley does. She doesn’t have an obvious mission—her subjects appear to be random people. I don’t know where they are from or what their stories are. Anderson-Staley keeps the anonymity of her subjects by only identifying them by their first names.
This small exhibit entitled One Wild and Precious Life is on view at Basket Books & Art. They are modern faces depicted by a charmingly old-timey means. Tintype gives her subjects an unexpected intensity. It makes her subjects seem as if they are all thinking, “What are you looking at, stranger?”
Weirdly enough, Anderson-Staley is not the only artist in Houston with a practice of producing modern portraits employing an ancient, deliberately old-fashioned technique. Nestor Topchy has produced a huge series of portraits in the form of Eastern Orthodox icons, with egg tempera and foil leaf. When one sees a modern person painted as if Andrei Rublev had done it in the 15th century, the sense of dislocation is powerful. One gets a similar feeling looking at Anderson-Staley’s tintypes. That dislocation makes these modest portraits of ordinary people feel epic.
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These are amazing!
Around 2014-15, Brooklyn artist Galina Kurlat was in Houston. While there she took portraits using the wet colloidal process. I commissioned three poses from her which I find really cool. It was fun to go into her dark room and watch the images appear on the glass as if my magic.