There are a lot of things I like about Kelsey Dillow’s photographs. That she shoots tintypes is enough to get me interested, but not enough on its own to keep me looking – a whole lot of people shoot wet plate these days. What keeps me coming back is the way she uses the process, but also the way she has lifted it out of the darkroom, out of the mysterious realms of abstract and ancient science and into the midst of the everyday.
Kelsey shoots ordinary people, often in a pop-up studio at markets and fayres, with a modern camera and a modern lens. And with a process that carefully avoids all the flaking emulsion, uneven-coating, contamination gimmicks we see so often hailed as the ‘unique properties’ of the ‘ancient art’. She doesn’t feel the need to distress her images or to allow a careless, dirty process to invite black dots, swirling emulsion or scratches to her images. They are also notable for their complete absence of sitters dressed in 1860s garb posing with shotguns in a Wild West saloon – though her Knoxville, Tennessee location would, I expect, make that relatively easy to arrange. ‘That doesn’t mean people don’t ask me,’ Kelsey says. ‘I get a lot of folks who ask if I have outfits they can wear. I’m like, “Nope, just come as you are.”’
What Kelsey is doing is something I haven’t seen anyone else in the wet-plate world doing – making a commercial business from shooting regular people in their regular clothes with a modern camera and lens, but using the wet-plate tintype process.
Spirit photography
‘I've been doing this since the summer
