New Tintypes

Here's the new batch of tintypes I produced. I'm happy with most of them. Some need to be redone to fix slight problems, but overall they pretty well match the previous tintypes I've made. As before, some of these read pretty quickly as mannequins, while others manage to reach that in-between level of human/dummy that I like. The girl with the teddy bear could give me nightmares, and the man in the striped shirt looks real until you get to his very squared-off haircut.

So the big question, the one I've been trying to answer this month, is what does this all mean? What the hell am I trying to say with these slightly spooky images of mannequins? The more I study 19th century portrait photography and some of the more recent theory regarding the work of this time period, the more I think that the pieces speak to the following ideas:

• The false notion of truth in photography: while the use of Photoshop has sullied the photograph's claim of absolute truth in recent years, there is still a largely-held belief that a photograph cannot lie, that it is an unobjective vision of reality. Unfortunately, every photograph lies. Whatever is cropped out of a photo tells a larger truth that can't be seen, and what is in the frame is chosen by the photographer, consciously or not. Also, the fact that a photograph tells the story of only a single moment in time takes away the temporal qualities that truth relies on. This allows the image in the photograph to be misconstrued by the viewer, leading to thousands of possible meanings and outcomes.
• The lie of nostalgia: in his book Forget Me Not, Geoffrey Batchen makes the comment that in past centuries, nostalgia was considered a very dangerous idea that was even labeled a mental disorder by some. Now, nostalgia is marketed to the masses. We like to look at the past as a simpler, better time, even if it never was that. People tend to look at old or simply old-fashioned photographs in this way, mostly because of the false notion of truth within them. A viewer can easily create his or her own story about a person dressed to the nines in an old tintype or daguerreotype, and imagine a sublime world for this person. It's easy to ignore the artificiality in all of this and believe whatever story you can come up with.
• The artificiality of memory: Geoffrey Batchen, again, makes an interesting point in his book when he asks the reader if his or her childhood memories are anything like the photographs taken during their childhood. Probably not; how often are difficult or painful times rushed to be recorded on film? Memory is a fluid construct which needs time to be created and destroyed. A photograph is a slice of unmovable time, automatically making it an artificial memory. At best, a photo can tell what and where with some accuracy. Why is impossible to decipher, and even when is an answer that can't be trusted.

So, making images of mannequins with tintypes is a somewhat ironic way of making the points above. There's lots more nuance and ideas to it than that, of course, including modern fashion and celebrity photography and its own problems with artificiality, but for now I think this is a good way of looking at it. Questions? Comments? Thoughts? Please share!!!