Mugging for the Big Camera

Posted on Sept. 8, 2015

What better way to capture the images of Music Maker’s unsung musicians than in tintype?

Put an extra-large camera in front of these natural performers, Tim Duffy ’91 (MA) says, and it’s like they’re up on stage playing and singing the blues. The big box is older than some of these octogenarians. Duffy and Aaron Greenhood, Music Maker’s artist services coordinator, began studying the process and went to work.

Tintype photography, which perhaps saw its most memorable use in the Civil War, involved creating a direct positive (reversed image) on a thin sheet of enamel-coated metal. Tintype came into use while its predecessor, the daguerreotype, was still in use, but it enabled photographers to work outside the studio and to produce a customer-ready product in just minutes.

Now the Music Maker Reflief Foundation can offer its artists lights as well as sound along with images that seem perfectly suited to the music. The tintype photographs have been touring the country, and three of them have been accepted into the permanent collection of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture.

The artists’ photographs accompany their stories in Duffy’s 2014 book, We Are the Music Makers: Preserving the Soul of America’s Music. Waiting at the tour’s end is Wilson Library, where the Timothy Duffy Collection will be archived.