Tintype portrait by AgNO3 Lab
The tintype photography booth at Penobscot Marine Museum was so popular in July that the museum has arranged for the booth to return, giving everyone another opportunity to have their tintype taken. The tintype booth is run by the AgNO3 Lab, which specializes in formal tintype portraits. The tintype process will be demonstrated to visitors during the day as the portraits are made. The tintype booth will return to Penobscot Marine Museum, Searsport, on Tuesday, August 18, from 10:00 am to 5:00 pm. Portraits will be made on a first come first served basis but reservations are recommended. Portraits are $40 per tintype, which includes a 2 for 1 museum admission. To make a reservation for a portrait call the museum at 207-548-0334.
“We are pleased to have the tintype booth back at Penobscot Marine Museum,” says Kevin Johnson, the Museum’s Photo Archivist. “The booth was booked solid and we had to turn people away. We had a crowd of visitors happily watching the tintypes being made. It was fascinating.” Tintypes were popular in the 1860’s and 1870’s, and many of the photographs taken during the Civil War were tintypes. They are not made on tin, but are a type of photograph made on a sheet of blackened iron.
Making a Tintype Portrait is part of Exploring the Magic of Photography: Painting with Light, Penobscot Marine Museum’s first major exhibition of historic photography. It includes four exhibits, a walk-in camera, a wall of selfies taken by museum visitors, an historic darkroom, tintype and cyanotype demonstrations, and workshops on making pin-hole cameras. The four exhibits, Through Her Lens: Women Photographers of Mid-Coast Maine, 1890-1920; Twenty Best; Evolution of the Photographic Snapshot: 1888-2015; and The Carters and the Lukes – Selections from the Red Boutilier Collection are filled with inter-active opportunities for visitors including life-sized photographic cut-outs with which visitors may photograph themselves, an online exhibit of visitor photographs and comments, and QR codes and tablets providing access to audio clips of interviews, biographies, and commentary by historians, curators and professional photographers.