ABSTRACT
This chapter more closely examines how tradition manifests in contemporary artistic practices. Some artists choose to make images with traditional processes from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, infusing their craft with tradition. The beginning of the twenty-first century saw chemical processes overwhelmed by new digital processes. This phenomenon is relatively short-lived as compared to the entire history of photography in which many different processes have dominated at certain points. Chemical photography as photographers know it is based on dry chemistry: industrially packaged film and slides that are precoated with photosensitive materials and come ready to be loaded into the camera for exposure. The wet-plate collodion tintype is one of several wet plate processes that enjoyed wide popularity in the mid-to-late nineteenth century. Tintypes are made on aluminum plates covered with dark lacquer, available at some professional camera stores. To make a photograph, these plates are covered with a collodion emulsion mixed with light-sensitive silver nitrates.
