Houston Photographer Revels in Taking Tintype Photographs

We’re all used to filters on our smart phone cameras or on Instagram that attempt to make a photo look “retro.” The process is as easy as a couple of taps on a screen. But one Houston photographer is doing it the hard way – the way they did it in the 1800s.

For the past several years, Keliy Anderson-Staley has been using replicas of 150-year-old cameras and lenses to take tintype portraits around the country. Tintypes are black-and-white photos made by casting a positive image onto a thin sheet of light-sensitive metal, and the exposures often took so long that families in 1800s portraits often came out looking overly stoic, or with a face that was a ghostly blur.

As Keliy Anderson-Staley tells Michael Hagerty, she had the chance to work with another photographer who was using the process, and those qualities are part of why she became obsessed with tintypes.

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An exhibit of Keliy Anderson-Staley’s tintypes called “On a Wet Bough: Contemporary Tintype Portraits,” is on display May 9 through July 6 at the Houston Center for Photography.