Tintype Time Capsule

Marshall After the Flood

A week before the storm, our creative river community felt vibrant and alive. Marshall, like so many mountain towns, was devastated by the Appalachian apocalypse caused by Helene. For weeks, existing in our collective trauma, we worked side by side to excavate our town from the devastation. A month in, I built a makeshift darkroom in my Subaru and headed downtown.

If wet plate collodion teaches a photographer anything, it’s the power of intention, the necessity of slowing down, and the art of trusting the process. There is nothing inherently fast about the wet plate process. As a documentary photographer, I found it humbling to realize that a successful day meant creating three good photographs. This challenging medium became the perfect portal to document Marshall in the months following the storm and initial cleanup.

Each plate requires multiple chemicals and must be created, shot, and developed before it dries. Every image is one of a kind—slow, meticulous, and fragile. Yet in its imperfections lies its magic. Patented in 1856, the tintype was once a cheap, accessible portrait style for the working class. The sturdy tintype replaced glass ambrotypes and became popular during the Civil War for its portability. Today, it’s experiencing a renaissance among analog photographers and mobile darkroom enthusiasts.

My subjects chose their locations and how their stories appeared on the aluminum plates. As the images emerged in the fixer, their stories surfaced too, transforming darkness into light. This intimate medium offered space to pause, reflect, and reconnect.

These raw black-and-white portraits capture the artists, musicians, makers, dreamers, and workers—the heartbeats of our town. When the history of this time is written, I hope these images remain as testimony to the spirit of this community. Born of destruction, they are quiet reminders of our resilience.

What began as a simple idea has become the greatest honor of my career: to document this place and the people who call it home. Looking back on this humbling experience a year later, I know that choosing wet plate collodion might have been the slowest way to capture these moments, but it allowed me and my subjects to catch our breath and create magic together. To witness history unfolding before my eyes, to make photographic magic on the streets of my town—it’s an experience I will carry with me forever. It honors not just the destruction, but the quiet, powerful persistence of the people who live and continue to rebuild here.

This is not my project—it is our project. Our shared story. Our little magic town.

🖤 It has been an honor of my artistic career to capture the resilience of this beautiful place and it’s fantastic people.

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