Giles Clement is a contemporary photographer who likes to do things the old-fashioned way, because the Nashville-based creative makes eerily beautiful portraits uses camera equipment made in the 1800s.
“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.”
Clement uses 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), two techniques that were popular in the 1850s and the 1860s, and as you can see from the pictures below, the end result is both haunting and arresting.
