One Missoula photographer is bringing back a method of photography that has been around for nearly 170 years.

Photographer Chris Chapman remembers the days before digital cameras and got his start on film cameras like Polaroids. He learned analog methods when he attended photography school at the Brooks Institute in Santa Barbara, which has since closed. It was around this time that the first digital cameras hit the market.

Encouragement from professors convinced Chapman to commit to being a fulltime photographer and for 20 years that’s what he did. Digital cameras seemed like the obvious choice for the commercial work that he was doing. But the pandemic brought much of his business to a halt.

However, it was good timing since the grind of commercial photography had started to become “joyless.” Chapman had already been itching to get his hands back into photographic chemistry and pull out his old cameras. He decided the way to do it was through portraiture.

The portrait was a realm of photography he had not played around with before and he dove in headfirst. But he didn’t want to just be in a studio photographing and “shooting a lot of pictures and then picking the best one off of a computer screen.”

“I wanted it to have kind of an immediate product that people could watch happen and see come to life,” Chapman said.

With his knowledge of older developing methods, he settled on using tintype photography, in which images are exposed onto a metal frame. It’s a slow process that blends chemistry and art in one.

Tintype photography is one of the earliest developed methods. Long before digital and film cameras, black and white photographs were being captured on treated metal or glass.

The metal plate where the photograph is captured first needs to be coated in collodion, which is a chemical that helps to produce the image. The plate is then dipped in a light sensitive silver nitrate solution and from this point on in the process, the plate needs to be kept in the dark.

Chapman has achieved this by building himself a “darkbox,” that he can reach into without exposing the plates to light. To see what he is doing, there is a small window that is tinted red to allow in light that won’t react with the chemicals.

The plate sits in the solution for five minutes and Chapman can use this time to have his subjects find a comfortable position in front of the camera.

Given that Chapman averages about two to three individual photos an hour, he encourages people to bring wine and dogs as a way to loosen up and make the process more fun and personal. The slowness of the process creates a more intimate experience and gives people a chance to shake off anxiety around getting their photo taken, Chapman said.

After the five minutes is up, the plate is ready to go into the camera but must remain wet. Because of that, tintype photography is also referred to as wet plate collodion photography.

The chemicals used in tintype photography react to light in unique ways. Reds, browns and oranges can come out looking black, and blue eyes have a tendency to “glow.”

The wet plate goes into the camera and Chapman then takes a single photo. Then the plate is removed and bathed in more chemicals to expose the photo. This part of the process can be especially rewarding because people are reacting to the photo slowly revealing itself and coming to life in real time, Chapman said.

Chapman adds a varnish that seals in the photo and can make it last hundreds of years without fading or disappearing. He then dries the varnished photo over a small flame.

“Things can go really sideways when varnishing,” Chapman said. “You can take a perfectly good plate and practically ruin it at the very last step and set it on fire.”

That’s something that Chapman says he has only done a handful of times.

The end result is a photograph that is never the same as the last. The chemicals used in the process leave traces on the photograph that end up looking like smoke billowing around the edges and across the frame. That effect combined with Chapman’s knack for capturing depth and expression in a subject’s gaze creates strikingly intimate images.

The reactivity of the chemicals and their sensitivity to light and the environment means that the final photograph is always a mystery until the very end. The age of chemicals, time of day, ambient temperatures or tiny specks of dust in the environment can change the image in ways that aren’t seen until the very end.

“That’s part of the appeal to me is that there is an element of the unknown,” Chapman said. “Am I going to get an image at all? If so … what’s it going to look like?”