Giles Clement is not your usual photographer, he does it his own way, or rather the way it was done back in the 1800s.
The Nashville-based artist makes portraits using both tintype (a photograph taken as a positive on a thin tin plate) and ambrotype (an early type of photograph made by placing a glass negative against a dark background): “My tintype images are created using equipment made more than 160 years ago,” writes the photographer on his website. “From an era when cameras were made by craftsmen in small shops and lenses were designed using slide rules, experience, and feel. The inherent flaws of these instruments lend themselves perfectly to my view of a beautifully imperfect world.“
These techniques were used in the 1850s and the 1860s, and using them now serves almost as a time machine to take the photo subjects hundreds of years back.
