When Paul Lender shows up for a pop-up photography event, it’s a little bit like a circus sideshow.

He lugs an 80-year-old Burke and James Commercial View Camera (an old-school, folding camera with an accordion-esque extension) into a venue like Lakewood’s GoodKind Coffee or downtown Cleveland’s Rebuilders Xchange, and sets up a small studio space.

A customer shows up for their allotted time, and poses. Lender carefully focuses the camera and, once things are fine-tuned, clicks the camera’s shutter for a long exposure, capturing the image on a light-sensitive plate. Then he dips the plate into a mix of chemicals, revealing and properly exposing an image, before washing and sealing the photo. Over the span of 15 minutes, Lender produces one singular portrait.

The wet plate collodion process, in action: Lender showcases the science live, and produces high-resolution images that are, at their heart, one of a kind.

At these three or four annual pop-ups and through commissions, Lender has helped to make a 170-year-old photography process a current part of Northeast Ohio’s photography world. Welcome to Cleveland TinType.

Lender is one of just a few photographs in the region who was drawn to tintype photography, and one of the only to host pop-up style events for customers to purchase his work. Greg Martin also uses the wet plate collodion process for many of his portraits, while Michael Rhodes creates tintypes partly through his involvement in the Civil War reenactment community.

“The appearance of them is so unique; I think people are very attracted to that one-off, ‘it’s gonna last forever’ appeal,” Lender says about the format. “Some people say it’s the most honest photo of themselves that they’ve ever seen.”

Pandemic Beginnings

Lender, a full-time biologist at Avery Dennison, grew up taking photographs for Willowick Middle School’s photo club and, later for Eastlake North High School’s yearbook and student newspaper. He returned to the photography hobby on the side in 2008 with his Left of Center digital photography brand, focusing on portraits, senior photos and weddings. Despite that digital focus, he was interested in tintype photography and, in 2012, even acquired a large-format camera to try it. It wasn’t until the pandemic that he decided to dive in.

“Like everybody else in photography, you got shut down. You couldn’t do inside sessions, you couldn’t do outside sessions. My kids’ activities got canceled, so I wasn’t hauling them around to ballet classes and things like that,” Lender says. “I had all this time, and I was like, ‘Well, let’s finally figure out this tintype thing.’”

Following a few phone calls to fellow tintype photographers, and hours and hours of YouTube videos, Lender finally gave the wet plate collodion process a try — a “disaster for about the first month or so.” The process involves mixing iodine with collodion, a sticky nitrocellulose material, to then coat a plate, which is dipped into silver nitrate to create a light-sensitive particle on the plate: a wet type of film, which is then developed with other chemicals.

After plenty of trial and error, Lender finally managed to figure out the formulas and how to properly expose his tintype images.

Then he decided to offer tintype photo sessions to the public, never expecting them to take off. At his pop-ups, Lender charges $75-$95 for tintype photographs, depending on the size.

“I had no plans whatsoever of generating income from the wet plate collodion process,” Lender says. “I figured it would be a very easy process to keep as a hobby because I didn’t think anybody would want to pay for it — and it turns out that quite a lot of people want to pay for it.”

Sense of Timelessness

Looking at Cleveland TinType’s Instagram, and you’ll see vibrant black-and-white eyes peering at you; chemical swirls and flecks of dust adding textures to background panels and wrinkles and smiles. Moving subjects are captured in a swirl of blur.

The imperfect, in-the-moment nature of tintype photography gives it some of its charm, Lender says.

“Every time I pour that chemistry, something a little bit different is going to happen,” Lender says. “Every single one of them is going to be different; even if I keep you standing in the same spot in the lights, there’s always that artful creation of it that’s just a little bit different.”

It’s a far cry from Left of Center’s carefully composed photographs, but it brings a creative challenge to Lender’s photography life. And, unlike digital photography, tintypes are inherently built to last and to be seen, in-person.

“A digital photo lives in a digital camera, bits and bytes on an SD card. You drop it on your computer, you maybe edit it, you post on Instagram or Facebook or TikTok or wherever, and it might never really exist beyond that, except on your phone when you show it to somebody,” Lender says. “There are tintypes from 170 years ago; there are still thousands and thousands of them. You hope that the same thing happens with the ones we’re making today.”

Lender plans on hosting his next Cleveland TinType portrait pop-up this summer. Interested customers can sign up for appointments ahead of time, once it is announced; he suggests following the Cleveland TinType Instagram or checking out his website, locphoto.com/popups, for details when they become available.

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Editor’s note: May marks Asian Pacific American Heritage Month, which celebrates the histories of Americans hailing from across the Asian continent and from the Pacific islands of Melanesia, Micronesia and Polynesia. NPR’s Picture Show will be bringing stories from these communities to our audience this month.

I developed this photo essay, Roots Hanging from the Banyan Tree, over the past three years. Photography became my therapy as I grappled with loss, grief and racial reckoning over the course of the pandemic. Searching for my identity as an Indian American woman became intertwined with the struggle to ground myself after losing my grandmother to COVID-19.

After her passing, my understanding of life and death shifted. In conversations with my mother, I learned that we both felt a sudden severance of our roots. In my grief, I grasped for memories of a simpler time. I connected with the Patil family, hoping to find a semblance of my childhood in their homes. Through documenting their daily lives, recollections of cultural rituals from my childhood began to flood back in. I also found that I was not alone in my experiences and fears of losing my connection with my heritage.

These images represent my experiences growing up between two cultures while navigating girlhood and early adulthood. I saw myself in the Patil family’s young children. While looking back through my old family albums, I found that our shared rituals and experiences were nearly identical. I suddenly felt less isolated in my experience as an Indian American and as a third-culture woman.

In their home, I was able to revisit memories as a young adult and recognize the beautiful aspects of the Indian American experience. What began as my thesis work grew into a labor of love that has shown me that my roots and cultural connection have been with me all along. As children of a diaspora, our cultural roots continue to grow and spread, but the soil is ours — we flourish where we are planted.

Maansi Srivastava (she/they) is an Indian American documentary photographer and photo editor focusing on widespread social issues through a lens of family and community. She previously worked at the Washington Post and NPR. This June, she’ll begin a yearlong photography fellowship at the New York Times. See more of Maansi’s work on her website, maansi.photos, or on Instagram, @maansi.photo.

Zach Thompson copy edited this piece.

Grace Widyatmadja oversaw production of this piece.

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