The project we're currently working on is called Vanishing Voices. We are
attempting to take portraits of the last known speakers of languages that are
currently really endangered and about to be lost. We found out that there was well
over 800 languages just in the United States that are endangered and we
started then on this journey of trying to find these language speakers.
I'm not a linguist, I don't come at this about language. I come at this about people.
They represent to me an aspect of our culture that's disappearing. So we tried
to think what would be the best way to photograph these people and we chose to
use what's referred to as a wet plate collodion tintype, which is the same
photographic process that was used in the 1800s, mid 1800s.
Not only is it an aesthetically beautiful process but it has this
historical significance.
Finding the language speakers is probably the hardest part,
one of the many hard parts.
We have to pull this mobile darkroom with us so wherever they are
we have to be able to drive to them and so sometimes that's Arizona,
sometimes it's Kodiak, Alaska.
This project is really laborious and there's
a lot of opportunities for failure. The process is also incredibly unique, every
plate is different. We start out with what's called collodion and collodion is
gun cotton dissolved in ether alcohol and so it's extremely flammable. A lot of
the early practitioners of tintypes would sometimes catch themselves on fire or blow themselves up.
We first coat the plate with a collodion the collodion has
to be perfectly smooth and even across the plate.
Then we put the plate into a bath of silver nitrate.
The silver nitrate embeds itself into the collodion.
We pull the plate out of the bath and put it into a plate holder then we have
to hurry and get it out to the camera, so we only have so much time.
Because this process requires so much light, our exposure times are often very
long. They have to hold perfectly still.
We make the exposure, 10-15 seconds, "pop!" they jump.
We pull the plate out of the camera and take it back into the
darkroom environment, pour the developer onto the plate,
and we have to immediately stop the development process at just the right time
and we can bring it out of the trailer into the daylight.
And then we slide it into a tray of fixer and
at that point the image reverses and so now it starts to look like a photograph image.
What's actually happening here is the light that is reflecting off of you is
going into the camera and is literally being embedded on the surface of this
plate, so in a kind of a metaphysical sort of way I mean it's a piece of you
your light, on the surface of that plate.
So that plate becomes this really precious artifact.
And so when we leave it's like we're leaving with a little piece of them.
That step of the process is by far the most magical part,
this is where the sitter is usually just sitting there waiting and then all of a sudden
an image just materializes out of this fluid and they just are
kind of spellbound.
What we found is as these endangered language speakers see their photograph,
they're seeing photographs of themselves like they saw their ancestors.
The first time this happened it was a woman named Lucille. When Lucille saw her
tintype, she started to speak a very traditional prayer in her own language.
She spoke a lot about how
she in that moment felt connected with those who had come before her.
So we have a plate that was accepted
into the National Portrait Gallery at the Smithsonian in Washington DC and the
woman that was photographed on this plate, her name is Florence.
And she is one of the last speakers of a language called Alutiq.
And she lives in Kodiak, Alaska.
And she has this quality about her that is very humble but very resilient.
But when she looked into the camera, she has a little happy smile on
her face, but she looks as tough as nails.
And as we heard about her life, we could
see where that kind of strength and resilience came from.
Tintypes are one of the most archival processes
that have ever been created.
They will last hundreds and hundreds of years.
Each tintype is very, very unique.
You can't reproduce it, you can't just as easily create another one that looks
just like it. And that's exactly like the people that we're photographing because
they are important and they are special
and they are very unique.