Heckuva job, Brownie!

August 3, 2006 9:56 AM

Tintype Rebel. Time stands still for John Coffer. The wet plate and tintype photographer makes his home at Camp Tintype, a farm preserved from the 1860s. With no running water or electricity, Coffer travels the roads with his horse "Brownie" and an ox-drawn wagon to take his photographs. Coffer adopted the lifestyle of a Civil War-era itinerant photographer more than 20 years ago and was among the first to revive the wet plate process. He's created tintype stereoviews (that achieve a 3-D effect when viewed through a stereoviewer), the “world’s first” tintype movie [.mov], and a series of large format, 20” x 24” tintypes which may be the largest ever made. Lincoln would be proud.
posted by NationalKato (16 comments total)

That's some goodness, right there. What a beautiful movie.
posted by redsparkler at 9:58 AM on August 3, 2006

How to roll your own tintypes.

Today's NYT article has a bit more info on Coffer. Some more of his work can be viewed here.
posted by caddis at 10:10 AM on August 3, 2006

One thing that came out in the NYT article, he doesn't care too much for women, which really seemed to rub the female writer the wrong way.
posted by caddis at 10:13 AM on August 3, 2006

Thanks for the extra links, caddis!
posted by NationalKato at 10:13 AM on August 3, 2006

I kept on inspecting a western gunfight for some reason in the movie. It really reminds one of the first films to be produced. Though, I wish there were even more examples of his work.
posted by Atreides at 10:14 AM on August 3, 2006

Fantastic post, I would love to be able to produce photographs like that.

Trivia: Bastian from Neverending Story left the movie business to pursue his interest in wet plate photography and is now apparently a master.
posted by fire&wings at 10:19 AM on August 3, 2006

awesome post.
posted by shoepal at 10:28 AM on August 3, 2006

Great post, thanks. We recently sorted some old family photographs that included several tintypes form the late 1800s.

More about the tintype—aka 'ferrotype'—process at A History of Photography. One thing to note is that the image on a tintype plate (being the one and only 'print') is typically reversed left-to-right.

Small gem tintypes taken with multi-lens cameras were the wallet photos of their day.
posted by cenoxo at 10:52 AM on August 3, 2006

Yeah, the reporter definitely comes off as a bitchy cunt in that article.
posted by keswick at 11:00 AM on August 3, 2006

I would like to see some photos of essentially modern scenes done in that style. The juxtaposition would be cool, I think.
posted by thekilgore at 11:21 AM on August 3, 2006

from the wired article:He recently produced a tintype movie -- the first of its kind, he claimed -- featuring his apprentice DeLooza strapping a straight razor.

It's STROPPING, dammit!
posted by notsnot at 11:40 AM on August 3, 2006

Wired is pretty much the last magazine I would expect to get that right, how about you?
posted by keswick at 11:43 AM on August 3, 2006

They don't have one straight-razor freak in their editorial offices? Yeesh. You've got a point tho.
posted by notsnot at 12:06 PM on August 3, 2006

I thought the NTTimes article read like a hight school newspaper. The reporter put way too much of herself in the piece.

I don't imagine she ever got a journalism degree.
posted by Megafly at 12:26 PM on August 3, 2006

Jeez...I just read the NYT story...and snarky doesn't BEGIN to cover the reporter's tone in the story.

She really seems to have missed the point...
posted by aldus_manutius at 12:29 PM on August 3, 2006

Wicked Post! Great job Kato!
posted by Dantien at 7:12 AM on August 4, 2006