UCO professor creates memories on metal

By Tricia Pemberton

Published: April 27, 2008

EDMOND — Unlike most tintype photographers, Mark Zimmerman is not interested in re-enacting history.

"I'm not trying to do everything the way they did it in the Civil War,” the University of Central Oklahoma photography professor said, "but I love the photos these lenses create.

"I love digital, but I like to be able to slow down and concentrate on one photo. I like what it does to the subjects.”

A look at Zimmerman's setup confirms he's more than 140 years removed from the battlefields populated by Matthew Brady and others who used the wet collodion process to record images on iron, blackened with asphalt and chemical spirits. There's no actual tin in tintypes, the proper name being ferrotypes.

Zimmerman works often out of his suburban Edmond home, next to glass doors that filter northern light. His subjects, many of them his students, sit in kitchen chairs, minus the intimidating head braces that held people still in the 1800s. Most subjects don't smile, Zimmerman explained, because the exposure takes so long.

His lens and his camera are from different centuries. The lens was made in 1858. The camera, an 8x10 wooden view, was built in the 1940s or '50s. He uses trophy aluminum and sometimes glass (or ambrotype) to capture his images.

Though he does have a portable darkroom (that is, a big black box), his primary darkroom is his garage. It's strewn with old junk and boxes, but it's also where he keeps his carefully protected chemicals — the collodion that stings the nostrils to coat the plate; a bath of silver nitrate.

An iron, vinegar and alcohol mixture serves as the developer, which he stops with water. A homemade fixer suffices instead of the more popular but more deadly potassium cyanide. He dries the plate over an oil lamp. Lavender oil, alcohol and gum sandarac seal the image with an aromatic finish. Every tintype photographer is part chemist, he said.

The image develops slowly, almost ghostly — white skin floating into view, stark against black metal. Another photo is added to a growing collection.

Zimmerman says he's one of just two or three people in Oklahoma who produce their own tintypes. His interest was sparked several years ago in a workshop taught by France Scully Osterman at the International Photography Hall of Fame at the Science Museum Oklahoma.

Her husband, Mark Osterman, is the process historian and a teacher at the George Eastman House of the International Museum of Photography in Rochester, N.Y. He said he and his wife were the first modern photographers to teach workshops on the process in the 1990s.

"When we started, there were maybe six to eight people in the world who did this process,” Osterman said. "The only people doing it were re-enactors, but nobody showed or published their work. Now, there are journals and Web sites. There may be thousands of people doing this.”

Still, he said, tintype photography will never be mainstream. It is catching on outside the United States, however. Osterman said he and his wife now teach collodian workshops in countries such as Japan, Ireland and Italy.

Osterman said part of the draw for him is that tintypes are actually artifacts.

"These are not negatives,” he said. "The plate in the camera is what was handed to the customer. It is the object that was in the room with the person when it was made.

"It was often touched by the photographer, and often their fingerprints will be on it.”

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