In 2017, Leah Sobsey and Tim Telkamp were the recipients of the first Click! Photography Festival PIC Grant. The goal of the project, Tintypes: A Community Portrait was to engage with the community and bring people together through the wet plate collodion process. The idea was similar to that of the bookmobile or the ice cream truck where people come out of their houses and on to the street to engage with each other and in the process, create a large community portrait. The project had them taking their mobile tintype unit into the community, setting up across the Triangle hoping to include a few participants from each location. What happened instead was an overwhelming interest from the community and in the end, they made over 80 tintype portraits. In the spirit of a true collaboration, families, friends, couples, and individuals came out to participate in the mobile tintype project. Sitters decided how they wanted to pose collaborating with the artists to create their own unique portrait.
Tintypes are created using the wet plate collodion process which dates from the mid-1850s and was in widespread use through the 1870s. To take a collodion photograph, collodion and other chemicals are applied to a plate just before use and the photograph is captured, developed, and rinsed before the plate is allowed to dry. The whole process takes about 15 minutes while the photographer goes into the mobile dark-room, pours the emulsion and then processes the plate.
