Tintypes

I started helping my Grandmother on a little photography project she has been wanting to do for some time. It began as an innocent sorting and labeling of photos -- photos which happen to document more than a hundred years of family history. This photo here is of my Great Grandfather as a young boy. It was most likely taken in 1902.

My family has samples of some of the world's earliest photographs -- the tintype. Its a distant relation to the daguerrotype, the difference being that daguerrotypes are images in silver while tintypes are in...tin. They work by the same concept as modern photography -- light-sensitive material is exposed to light which imprints an image on the material. In modern photography, that material is film. In 1870, it was metal.

The collection we have has been sitting in a paper bag in a drawer for decades. It includes images of family members, friends, small children, portraits of lace-laiden ladies and dashing young men in their Sunday Best. The metallic background has preserved these serene and often melancholy faces for more than a hundred years. And here, still, they seem to stare back at me as if still alive, the light behind their eyes a living light and not just the reflection of fluorescent on tin.

Here for example, this is my Great-Aunt, posing with a friend sometime around 1900.

What I know of her is that her husband was a seafarer, she held stock in GE prior to and through the Great Depression (she herself, not her husband), and that she had one child, a daughter, who passed away in infancy and was never discussed even though her baby clothes were passed on to surviving cousins. And there it is, one life, summed up.

And this, this is Bill Starr, perhaps a good friend of my great-grandfather's older brother.

I've been obsessed with Bill Starr. I have no idea who he is, or why my family has so many pictures of him. He probably influenced the life of someone in my history, but how? And whom?

Finally, I have countless photos of young girls dressed in their most expensive clothes. They are the most melancholy lot. I have no leads on them. Who they are, or why I have their photo is a mystery. What did they become in adulthood? And did they make it that far?





And now to imagine that they lived and breathed one day long ago -- that they had families of their own, houses, thoughts, feelings, self-awareness...and could never have envisioned a world where a distant relative is so intrigued by their photo, had never seen a tintype, has a computer, writes something called a 'blog', doesn't wear a corset...