Civil War Faces and The American Tintype

The Library of Congress has released an amazing collection of almost 700 images of framed, Civil War-era tintypes and ambrotypes. I’ll stick a few under the fold, but you really should click over and browse the set. (Someone should make a book.)

A while back I bought America and the Tintype [amazon], by Steven Kasher. It’s a pretty good book – for some reason not included on the list of tintype-related titles on the LOC’s flickr page – but a bit pricey. I’ll just quote a bit from the intro and concluding essays:

A uniquely American phenomenon, the tintype was developed in Ohio in 1856 and popularized by their use as political campaign buttons in the 1860’s.

[an image from the LOC set: young, African-American boy with Lincoln campaign button]

These inexpensive and durable images were created and disseminated by thousands of itinerant makers who fanned out across the United States. As prosperity and leisure time increased for many, their desire to record themselves also increased. Unlike the costly and time-consuming daguerreotype, the photographic medium of the upper and middle classes in the nineteenth century, the tintype’s affordability encouraged sitters to explore and express their individuality and personality, making it the first truly democratic form of photographic portraiture [most of the Civil War images are pretty formal – with a few exceptions]. We see amateur performers, African American nannies with their white charges, butchers brandishing knives, men lounging in front of painted backdrops of beaches, girls holding dolls, and men staging mock robberies. The sitters showed up at the studio with props and reenacted their own stories; the tintypist recorded these often humorous self-portraits on thin pieces of iron sheeting preserved with a coat of varnish.

Then, from the final essay:

By around 1890, Kodak had killed popular tintype production with a sequence of technical, manufacturing and marketing innovations. By 1880, the founder of Kodak, Dr. George Eastman, was mass-producing dry-plate negatives, replacing the obstinate wet plates that had required the practices fingers of professional photographers, including tintypists. By 1885, Eastman was manufacturing celluloid roll film, the fundamental material of still and motion-picture photography (until the digital age) … ‘Kodak’ was a made-up word, a marketing word, a brand that Eastman thought would sound catchy in any language around the glob. He also coined the phrase, ‘You press the button, we do the rest.’ Suddenly, everybody could be a photographer. Tintype studios closed in droves.

Of course, hipsters in the 1890’s favored the hipstamatic iKodak app, to make their photographs look like old tintypes …

Anyway, the LOC set is just amazing. And, apparently, it is not some ancient holding of some venerable institution but items collected in the last 15 years by a Virginia family that took up the hobby, spent a lot of time on eBay and at auctions, trade shows and such. Good for them for donating it to the LOC.