Portrait of L.C. Kelly, by Michael N. Foster.
When you lean back and stare down the long history of a place, it is easy to see why a genre like Southern Gothic might arise from the alluvial soil and wild river on the other side of the levee, from the dark of the piney woods in the hill country, where just because you’re a little closer to the stars don’t mean it’s any brighter. Faulkner lived in Oxford and was familiar with the land towards the river; his stories conjure wild jungle-dark forests and repressive heat, the glory of springtime in the bright woods, and the specters of an Antebellum South. He wrote with the Civil War at his back, against a past that was rapidly changing into the future beneath his feet.
When I think of Southern Gothic, I think of a tintype image. Stark, sharp, dark. Anonymous stories in uniform, unsmiling, clutching pistols or sabers at their chests. Women in mourning, men in arms, each unnamed face holding some resemblance. Any of these men could have been an ancestor, the unknowing as long and permanent as Ol’ Man River.
“I had to go. A spirit in my feet said Go, and I went.”
—Matthew Brady
Mathew Brady is a tintype photographer whose work you’ve probably seen, even if you don’t know his name. He made portraits of Abraham Lincoln, Grant and Lee, Stonewall and Sherman, Davis. He began making portraits of young soldiers before they left for the Civil War, advertising this effort with a creeping truism, “You cannot tell how soon it may be too late.” What began as a portrait-for-profit endeavor became a real interest in documenting the conflict, and out Brady went to the field. “I had to go. A spirit in my feet said Go, and I went.”
The tintype was quick to market and described by photographic historian and artist Steven Kasher as, “the first truly democratic form of photographic portraiture.” It came in the 1860s and went by the 1870s as more affordable and quicker-acting methods of photography emerged. As a result, this uniquely American photographic method sets an aesthetic timestamp on one of the nation’s darkest historical periods, as well as some of its most legendary and infamous characters.
Contemporary Mississippi photographer Michael N. Foster pointed out that tintypes often capture more character than beauty. You see it in the gaunt and haggard face of a war-worn Lincoln. Tintype cameras take several seconds of exposure to make the image, if the conditions are correct. In many of the Civil War landscapes, movement was captured more as a blur, suggesting ghosts.
What’s left? Brady’s acolytes were many and went on to make portraits of their own, to teach the next generation. Somehow, even as its popularity waned, the process was kept alive, and in the modern world, the spirit to learn is still getting in people’s feet.
Staring down the modern tintype photographers of Mississippi, one can see the evident devotion to the old practice, connected somehow to the devotion to this region itself. It makes sense, in this land of the Southern Gothic. Each artist comes from a different background—care for their place in this state the driving force behind the work.
The thing about tintype photographers is they have the opportunity, and beyond opportunity, obligation, to directly develop their images, immediately—sometimes using the water right there around them, in the river, to create the negative. One image is made at a time on the square of tin or glass, usually 4x6 or 5x7; 11x14 images are considered “mammoth plates.” The piece of metal is prepared with a thin layer of collodion, then while still wet, it is sensitized in silver nitrate, before, finally, the image is exposed. The cameras truly look old timey, complete with a photographer’s cape, a wooden box with its lens and wooden legged tripod, a cord to a trigger that fires the shutter. You sit very still while the shutter exposes and closes. After exposure comes the development process, the fixing, the washing. Part of the magic is the idea that since the photos are so rapidly developed, the subject would have been in the room while the image appeared on the metal. Lincoln might have breathed over Brady’s shoulder, and uttered the same quiet “wow” as we do, his face appearing beneath the developing fluid.
Photo of the Gulf, by S. Gayle Stevens
Our first subject is S. Gayle Stevens, who lives in Illinois but is often a character of the Mississippi Gulf Coast. She’s been practicing wetplate collodion photography for nearly two decades after learning the process through a series of workshops and sheer determination to push its limits. Her images of the coast’s hurricane-swept landscape post-Katrina are scraped, dappled, dark, pooled; nature is coming up through the concrete, the tiles of a lost home reflecting the sky, developing fluids looking like spirits creeping into the frame, like the water that flooded above stage. She holds in time staircases to nowhere, the work beyond a photograph and more like a painting. She speaks of walking in the woods with her father as a child, of the importance of bees, and once made a series called Disappearance. The installation included one hundred wet plate tintypes of individual bees. During the show, folks could “buy” their own bee, creating a process that imitates life, in which the bees are slowly disappearing, one by one. Accompanying the individual portraits was a mammoth plate she made for which she collected a large quantity of dead honeybees. It looks just like the seeds of a sunflower head, just like a solar eclipse, saying the same thing: without the sun, there is not life; without the bees, there is not life.
Stevens’s images of dandelions, leaves, butterflies, often collected on walks, connect the past to the ever-changing present. The world around us is always dying, but it can be saved in a tintype image, which is itself eternal.
Shelby Cemetery, by Butch Ruth.
Euphus “Butch” Ruth is a photographer who has been making wet plates for around twenty years and keeps a studio outside of Greenville, near the Arkansas state line. He’s out near Warfield Point Park and is always dressed impeccably; exactly the sort of specter you’d imagine becoming a tintype photographer, with his vest, suspenders, pinstripes, hat, beard, shined shoes. His studio-darkroom fits as well, with a coffin, red lights, wood floors—his work displayed starkly on the walls.
Ruth learned his craft from John Coffer’s Camp Tintype in Dundee, New York. He took the three-day beginner’s workshop and learned to manipulate the chemicals, only to come home to the heat and humidity of Mississippi, where nothing came out correctly. His only recourse was to send a letter to Coffer explaining the problem and wait for him to write back—which he did, offering advice for a Southern climate tintype.
Over time he figured it out. Today, to see him work in the darkroom is to witness a master, or a mad scientist, in action—bending light and dark. He described trying to make the images look more like the picture he had in his mind than the reality he found upon arriving to make the photograph. Some work looks like a reflection, marred with ripples, like a heartbeat in the chemistry. Every aspect of the image becomes a character in a stirring drama: the broken ribs of a falling church, the light in the sky striking, ruins becoming more like ancient ruins, where our history moves beyond loss and into something more like lore, if we can just remember how to tell stories anymore.
"Chair Study," by Jonathan P. Smith.
Newer to the tintype scene is Jonathan P. Smith, who grew up in New Albany, Mississippi. Beginning only two years ago, he learned the process from Lisa Elmaleh in West Virginia. He was already well-studied in storytelling, as a photographer and documentarian for more than thirty years. After living in several different states, he returned to his childhood land of New Albany because “there are so many stories to explore here.” He says he is drawn to wet plate photography because of the handmade quality of the images. He spent many years as a digital photographer and filmmaker, and “missed creating final products with my hands.”
He was also drawn to it because of a lifelong interest in history. In a previous professional life, he worked as an archaeologist with a focus on the Southeast. Staring at historic photography day in and day out, he became curious about the processes used to create those images.
“One thing that drew me to wet plate is the way it makes you think, both as photographer and viewer, about the medium and what the image represents,” he said. “Using one of the oldest photographic methods to address modern issues, for me, just demonstrates the way history continues to impact us in our daily lives, even when we think we’ve moved past it, or it no longer applies.”
Portrait of the author, Marshall Blevins-DeLoach, by Michael N. Foster.
The first tintype photographer I ever met was Michael N. Foster; he’s self-taught in this strange and particular art and was part of the reason Mississippi magnetized me. Foster was “hatched and raised” in Vicksburg and grew up running the red clay hills. Today, he lives on forty acres of pine forest in Water Valley, and makes portraits because he loves people. One work of his that always strikes me is of L.C. Kelly, who Foster met one afternoon across from his office in Batesville. Kelly was pulling a trailer full of sweet potatoes, and had a flat tire. Foster helped him fix it and learned he was a pig farmer. Naturally, the portrait was made, a quiet and beautiful man there among his hogs in their pen, graceful, with pride for his life’s work, the light soft around him. Foster also befriended a musician with a long beard and a quick wit named Harpo, too full of stories, that lived near a junk yard and played music. The portraits are poignant and done in brotherhood, instead of outsider-looking-in.
It’s incredible to be standing in a Mississippi field in 2026 and to be suddenly transported back to 1856, holding oneself very still in the sunshine, unsmiling, while a photographer throws a cape over their back, and leaves you staring at a box and a lens. The shutter snaps. Quickly they pull the plate, pour developer, and the image materializes the same as magic. We are not so different from our past—curious, with hope for the future and reverence for what came before us, and still very eager to dress up in costume to make a good photograph. The Southern Gothic land we live in as Mississippians is not all that different from the land Faulkner knew and wrote about, the spirit still in the air to be captured by camera, or by pen.
