The Tintype Project
Jessica Tampas' new series, The Tintype Project, depicts small natural objects and young children; the images are prayerful and meditative, yet confrontational. The natural objects (branches, nests, fruit), though mundane, seem almost sacred; the children gaze at us like small saints offering healing, or supplicants appealing wordlessly for connection. All have an air of the uncanny. Though frozen in time, they are very much alive.
It takes a great deal of labor and patience to create a tintype. The process (created and popularized in the late 19th Century) calls for metal plates, chemicals, old-world equipment, and long exposure times. Subjects are held in a neck brace to keep them perfectly still for the eye of the camera. As a result, the collaboration that exists between sitter and artist is palpable. There is an undeniably heightened energy in the subtle movement of breath, the watery surface of an unblinking eye, and an all-over shimmering in the silvery blur of emulsion. Time stops. The children captured in these tintypes are forever, children.
Most of Jessica’s subjects range in age from seven to nine years — pre-adolescent boys and girls “in the last rays of innocence, before they take the step from that place in their life they can’t come back to any more. One part of their lives is fading,” says the artist, “but something else is coming to the fore. This work digs deeper into the subject that any photographic process I’ve used before. It goes into the subject and reveals something that isn’t visible to the naked eye, the immediacy of that cusp. My subjects are children, but they are standing, innocent, on the edge of change. And that is very powerful.”