Jen Jansen Tintype Studio

The story

In a storefront along Western Avenue in Bucktown, photographer Jen Jansen works with a camera built right in Chicago a century ago. The centerpiece of her studio is a restored 11x14 studio view camera manufactured in the 1920s by Laben Deardorff—a mahogany-and-bellows monster that projects images directly onto ground glass. Rather than loading film or popping in an SD card, Jansen practices wet-plate collodion, an 1850s photographic technique where the light-sensitive chemistry must be mixed, poured, exposed, and developed before the plate can dry.

The chemistry leaves zero room for slacking off. Jansen hand-coats a sheet of metal or glass with viscous collodion, dips it into a silver nitrate bath to render it light-sensitive, and rushes the wet plate into the camera holder. You sit still beneath studio lights while the shutter trips, capturing raw light directly onto silver. The plate goes immediately back into the darkroom before the chemistry sets—producing a single, impossible-to-duplicate object born of metal, glass, and darkroom alchemy.

Because wet-plate collodion reacts primarily to ultraviolet and blue light, it records skin tones, eye colors, and clothing textures completely differently than digital sensors or modern color film. Freckles pop out, blue eyes turn pale silver, and warm colors cast darker contrast. You don't walk away with a digital image file trapped on a smartphone screen; you leave with a heavy, hand-varnished metal plate built to survive unchanged for generations.