On Sunday, 18 September, The Family Museum will be taking part in the Art Workers’ Guild Table Top Museum exhibition in Queen Square, Bloomsbury, London. We plan to display our comprehensive collection of tintype photographs, so I thought this would be an ideal time to write about one of the rarer photos that we have in our archive.
Scholarship on the tintype trade is scant, but in the most informative essay written on the subject, Cheap Tin Trade by Audrey Linkman, the author writes: ‘ The ferrotype lingered on in Britain to finally resign a very frail and tenuous hold on life in the early 1950s – a centenarian! ’
Other sources have cited a later date, but regardless of the exact timing of the industry’s demise, this simple shot of a little boy on a beach holiday, taken by a commercial seaside photographer, is the most modern tintype I have seen, by far. It comes from the same peer group album as the photos in my Coin-op Diary blog. All of the images in this collection date from the early to mid-1960s. At first I thought this image was also from this era, but I now think it more likely to date from the late 1940s or 1950s.
The traditional flaw in ferrotype photography – the technical name for tintypes – had always been their dullness and lack of fidelity by comparison to their paper and glass counterparts. Yet none of these problems are present in this photo; it is as bright and clear as any of its contemporaries. It seems a shame that the tintype trade ended just as it looked to have conquered its major aesthetic challenge.
See you on the 18th…
Nigel Martin Shephard
THE FAMILY MUSEUM 