American Tintype: The Power of Imperfection

on 30th Nov 2012

In a world of instant digital photography, traditional photographic techniques hold a certain nostalgic allure. Even before the faded, vignetted or over-saturated filters of Instagram, a cheap Soviet camera called the Lomo was making a resurgence among the hipster art scene, and winning fans the world over for its often unpredictable effects.

But Harry Taylor is an artist who is taking this love of retro image creation far further back, by creating tintype images using photographic techniques that were developed over 150 years ago.

During a long illness Taylor read books on early photographic theory, and, once well again, decided to put that knowledge into practice. The prints that he now creates have a haunting, delicate but imperfect beauty, as well as being the kind of substantial physical artefacts that no amount of photo sharing can make up for.