Daily Mail interview

Monica Orosz, of the Charleston Daily Mail, recently spoke with me about my foray into the world of wet-plate collodion photography. Thanks to Michael Buttrill, of Bootstraps Farm in Renick, for the only photos I currently have of myself actually working with the process.

CHARLESTON, W.Va. – Pocahontas County writer and photographer Drew Tanner has plenty of modern technological amenities at hand to do his job.

They make it fast and easy to take digital images and upload them immediately to the computer. The computer makes it fast and easy to manipulate images and then to write stories for the weekly Pocahontas Times.

Tanner appreciates all of the technology, really he does.

But when he putters around at home, it’s usually with something decidedly slower and with technology that dates back to the mid-1800s. Tanner likes to take photos with big boxy cameras, using a chemically treated plate made from tin and a wet process to produce a very carefully timed and lighted photograph on metal, one image at a time.

Tintype photography harkens to a time when subjects sat very still for their photos, which were captured in timeless black and white or sepia images. There was no clicking off images at high speed, no ability to use a computer program such as Photoshop to correct exposure, add color or even special effects.

One false move and the photo is ruined.

Tanner loves the process.

“It’s one thing to see a photograph on a screen,” he said. “But when you use 19th Century technology to take a photograph, when you see them and hold them in your hands, it reconnects you to an object very firmly. They are one-of-a-kind, handmade photos.

“This really slows you down and makes you think about your subject. You have to develop an eye for your light,” Tanner said.

Tanner has developed a series of tintypes that are on exhibit at Lewisburg’s Carnegie Hall through January. He has taken photos for friends and recently has been trying his luck at Civil War reenactments, where the portraits have proved popular.

Tanner, 31, drew up in northern Ohio, where he showed an inclination toward music at an early age. He headed to Capital University, a small Lutheran college near Columbus, as a music major, but realized after two years that wasn’t what he wanted to do and switched his major to international studies.

Late in his college career, he picked up a Pentax K1000 – “the prototypical college photography class camera” – at a rummage sale and began snapping photos and learning to develop film in the college darkroom.

At the same time, the first generation of digital cameras were being developed and Tanner, who worked at the college’s IT department, got to test out some of the first Sony cameras.

“I feel like my generation straddled those traditions,” Tanner said.

Tanner met his now wife when both were serving assignments with Americorps in Oregon. They ended up in West Virginia because of her job with High Rocks Academy in Hillsboro.

“I didn’t even set out to be a journalist,” Tanner said. “But I was searching the classified ads one day and I thought this could be interesting.”

He now works part time for the Pocahontas Times, where his title is digital media manager, though his job is broader than that. He started out seven years ago when the paper was still using film cameras from the ’70s.

Tanner also works part-time for the Pocahontas County Opera House, where his title of operations manager means he’s a jack-of-all-trades.

Together, the jobs are creatively fulfilling. Tanner has become invested in his community; he and his wife are slowly renovating a two-room schoolhouse that is their home. It includes a darkroom.

Besides making tintype images, Tanner still enjoys good old film photography, particularly black-and-white images.

“As long as I’ve been working with digital, I’ve also wanted to keep a foot in film,” he said. “I love the alchemy that happens in the darkroom.”

That’s another reason Tanner was drawn to wet plate photography.

He has a collection of old cameras and replicas of old cameras designed to hold the wet plates in wooden frames.

The process is a tedious one, especially when compared the ease of a point-and-shoot camera or even a cell phone with a camera function.

Tanner first prepares the piece of tin by applying a Japan Black lacquer that is baked on.

Then begins a process of carefully pouring chemicals on the tin, first collodion that has the consistency of warm maple syrup.

“You are trying to distribute it evenly and then you let it set up just a little bit,” Tanner said. The coated tin then goes into the darkroom, where it gets a bath of silver nitrate.

Here’s where some alchemy takes place. In layman’s terms, the salts in the collodion and the salts in the silver nitrate bond to create a surface that is sensitive to light.

The plate goes into a wooden frame and the frame goes into the camera, where it is protected from light until Tanner exposes it to the image – a scene or a person.

Once the tin has been exposed to light, Tanner heads back to the darkroom, where the developing process is much like the traditional film process, with developer and fixer agents, though the process doesn’t allow the same latitude as film developing.

“It’s a very tactile balancing act,” Tanner said. “I develop it by eye.”

From shooting the image to developing it can take 10 to 15 minutes – and again, this is for one image.

“It’s one of those things you have to keep practicing,” Tanner said.

Tanner said making money from his art photography isn’t his first goal, though if he can cover the cost of his hobby, that will be great.

He loves the juxtaposition of a subject in modern clothes, shot with a process that is 150 years old.

“That’s one of the things people find striking,” he said, adding he’s toyed with the idea of doing an anachronistic shot of say, a Civil War re-enactor with an iPod sticking out of his pocket.

This past summer, Tanner set up a booth at a reenactment at the Huntersville Traditional Days and took more than a dozen tintypes.

“I took one of a fellow who grew up in Huntersville and he and his grandson were both dressed as Confederate soldiers. I took a photo of them standing side by side and that was really special. That was one of my favorite moments of that day.”

Visit Tanner’s website at www.drewtanner.com.

 

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