American Tintype

American Tintype from Matt Morris Films on Vimeo.

Checking in my Vimeo channel, I noticed this wonderful short documentary picked by its staff about Harry Taylor who discovered a passion for the 150-year-old craft of tintype photography.

There are also remarkable samples of his craft on his tintype gallery, which I urge you to visit.

The ICP website describes tintype as: "One of the most intriguing and little studied forms of nineteenth-century photography. Introduced in 1856 as a low-cost alternative to the daguerreotype and the albumen print, the tintype was widely marketed from the 1860s through the first decades of the twentieth century as the cheapest and most popular photographic medium."

And Wikipedia defines it as a photograph made by creating a direct positive on a sheet of iron metal that is blackened by painting, lacquering or enamelling and is used as a support for a collodion photographic emulsion.

For those of you who don't have that deep passion and investment, you may want to make faux tintypes as described on Instagram's blog.

Yes, digital tintypes on your mobile devices! Enough to drive the purists bonkers.