If you're short on time just find William H Macy and move along
January 24, 2014 10:22 PM   Subscribe

Photographer Victoria Will took some fantastic tintype portraits of celebrities at Sundance.
posted by sacrifix (48 comments total) 41 users marked this as a favorite
 
If, like me, you don't immediately recognize these people here is a link that doesn't include all of the photos but names the people in them.
posted by sacrifix at 10:25 PM on January 24, 2014 [3 favorites]


Apparently Kenneth is always mugging like Kenneth.
posted by Beardman at 10:28 PM on January 24, 2014 [15 favorites]


Nick Cave wins at being the best modern person to be in a tintype.
Maggie Gyllenhaal and Elijah Wood are tied for second because perfect crazy eyes.
posted by chococat at 10:46 PM on January 24, 2014 [10 favorites]


Ahh, thanks for the second link. I was wondering who got the role of Young Larry King; I look forward to Michael Pitt's take on the material.
posted by Alvy Ampersand at 10:51 PM on January 24, 2014 [1 favorite]


Those are really good.
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 10:51 PM on January 24, 2014 [2 favorites]


What's up with that hand, Michael C. Hall?
posted by rue72 at 10:52 PM on January 24, 2014


Oh man, these are great. Phillip Seymour Hoffman's eyes are just haunting.
posted by neuromodulator at 11:07 PM on January 24, 2014


Dude. Flea.

This is totally a man who was a drifter visiting Kansas farms, stopping in to talk to families, until he found one that was just perfect and murdered them all in the dining room before feeding them to the pigs.

Whereas Jason Momoa is the man who was hired to bring him down.
posted by Katemonkey at 11:52 PM on January 24, 2014 [27 favorites]


Maggie Gyllenhall looks like a Bloody Bender documentary poster.
posted by elizardbits at 1:03 AM on January 25, 2014


One of those photos is of someone named jennifer.
posted by vicx at 1:18 AM on January 25, 2014


These are brilliant. Nick Cave is timeless isn't he?
posted by viramamunivar at 2:04 AM on January 25, 2014


Viramamunivar- I just came in to say that Nick Cave is always in tintype, even in real life. I wonder what he's shopping around/for at Sundance?
posted by aesop at 3:24 AM on January 25, 2014 [2 favorites]


I wonder what he's shopping around/for at Sundance?

This.
posted by K.P. at 3:28 AM on January 25, 2014 [1 favorite]


These are really great.
But, because I'm grumpy this morning...I might love them even more if the photographer had not made such conspicuously sloppy tintypes.
posted by Thorzdad at 4:25 AM on January 25, 2014 [8 favorites]


Oh, neat! Not much to contribute other than I went to high school with Victoria, and she is a very excellent person and photographer.
posted by eulily at 5:04 AM on January 25, 2014 [1 favorite]


Willem Dafoe looks like Rachel McAdam's vengeful spirit protector.
posted by zombieflanders at 5:44 AM on January 25, 2014 [3 favorites]


These are SO good! Elijah Wood is a young outlaw, and Philip Seymour Hoffman is most definitely headed for the gallows at dawn. I love the subjects who really got into the idea. Maggie Gyllenhaal is awesome.
posted by biscotti at 5:56 AM on January 25, 2014 [2 favorites]


So, I had to look up what tintype photography was and that led me to this.
posted by um at 6:25 AM on January 25, 2014 [4 favorites]


Damn, these are fantastic. Five points for whoever hipsterically dressed vintagely appropriate.

If PMHoffman was wearing a too small suit and a string tie, he would have won hands down. Same thing with Macy and those glasses, I'm thinking more American Gothic.

For me it's a tie between Wood, who absolutely crushes it, Gyllenhaal, who has the look, but needed to lose the earrings and borrow Wood's shirt, and Lance Reddick. Put him in Wood's shirt and in Hoffman's hypothetical poorly fitted suit, and he would have won. He understood the whole glasses thing.

Honorable mention to Don Johnson and Kurt Russell. Holy moly does the tintype bring out the weather in an older guys face.
posted by Sphinx at 6:25 AM on January 25, 2014 [4 favorites]


Those are so lovely.
posted by BlahLaLa at 6:49 AM on January 25, 2014


Fantastic. Thanks for sharing.
posted by widdershins at 7:12 AM on January 25, 2014


Beautiful but starfucky, not unlike Sundance.
posted by fungible at 7:34 AM on January 25, 2014


Unfortunately, a lot of these have them doing the sort of McCelebrityPortrait poses that you see all the time. (What are you praying for? That the camera doesn't add ten pounds?) But Maggie Gyllenhaal has a face made for tintype.
posted by Halloween Jack at 7:38 AM on January 25, 2014 [2 favorites]


There is something just endlessly fascinating about tintype/ambrotype photography. I'm never sure if it's because the look is all tied up with historical context, or if it's just the look of the medium itself; the muted palette and the way certain colors seem to read. And of course the long exposure time; usually around 14 seconds, which tends to encourage much more subdued poses and expressions than we're used to these days. (Kudos to Jack McBrayer for apparently holding that big grin perfectly still for so long!)

While we're on the subject, I feel like I should give a shout out to Del Hilbert at Victorian Photography Studio in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania - if you're interested in tintype photography, go sit for one! He pours the plate and talks you through the process, right through developing and fixing the photo. As one might expect most of his business is doing costumed shots of tourists and civil war re-enactors, but I'm sure he'd be happy to do contemporary portraits as well. (Standard disclaimer, I have no stake or affiliation, I'm just a happy customer.)

Someday I'm going to attend a workshop and try it myself, but in the meantime there's a TinType pack for Hipstamatic which is really pretty good.
posted by usonian at 7:47 AM on January 25, 2014 [5 favorites]


Wow. Just gorgeous. I'm always on the lookout for new interesting photographers. Thanks for posting.
posted by dorkydancer at 7:47 AM on January 25, 2014


My vote goes to the fella in 9th row on the right, below Michael C. Hall. I think the looking off to the side, the beard and black clothes make it appear more authentic and kind of ghostly.
posted by foxhat10 at 7:55 AM on January 25, 2014


This is neat, thanks for posting! It's funny how totally wrong and out of place the people wearing more modern clothing and poses look. Patterns? V-neck t-shirts and luxurious shampoo-commercial hair? Wrong!
posted by aka burlap at 8:00 AM on January 25, 2014


Holy moly does the tintype bring out the weather in an older guys face.

And hands! Look at Schwartzman doing the deadman pose.
posted by carsonb at 8:17 AM on January 25, 2014 [2 favorites]


I'd seen the ones for the film with Michael Pitt and Astrid Berges-Frisbey but not the rest of the shoot. Fantastic. I'm reminded of the fact that there's a fairly expensive tintype photo booth here in Austin and I'd like to be a hipster and go have a tintype done sometime this year.
posted by immlass at 8:37 AM on January 25, 2014 [1 favorite]



But, because I'm grumpy this morning...I might love them even more if the photographer had not made such conspicuously sloppy tintypes.

Yeah, that bugged me too.
posted by oneirodynia at 9:33 AM on January 25, 2014


Every time I see Kristen Stewart, either in a movie or in, say, a tintype picture, I bemoan the gender bullshit that exists in Hollywood.

In a perfect world this person would have a long action movie career and I don't mean in the Kate Beaton, Strong Female Characters sense. I mean Stewart has both the right kind of talent and demeanor to play female equivalent of The Man with No Name.
posted by sendai sleep master at 9:42 AM on January 25, 2014 [10 favorites]


Compare the modern tintype with previous Metafilter post on Lewis Powell, would be assassin of John Seward under Lincoln. In that discussion was how modern his portrait looked.

What I find fascinating is how some of the portraits have such an old feel through the falsity of sloppily done tintype. I assume that the photographer chose to go purposely rough. Nice post.
posted by jadepearl at 10:25 AM on January 25, 2014 [1 favorite]


Stewart has both the right kind of talent and demeanor to play female equivalent of The Man with No Name.

Or Johanna Mason, the character that Jena Malone plays in the second Hunger Games movie. (I've not read the books nor seen the movies, but someone on my Tumblr feed has repeatedly posted gifs of the character, whose favored weapon is apparently hand axes.) I'm not that familiar with most of Stewart's work, but I thought she did fine as Joan Jett in The Runaways.
posted by Halloween Jack at 10:31 AM on January 25, 2014


Who is the little kid toward the bottom? Holy moly. Samuel Gompers, come rescue me from the cigar factory.
posted by oflinkey at 10:55 AM on January 25, 2014




I took a daguerrotype workshop a while back and volunteered to be the "model". Not a flattering photo, but I learned a lot about the process - not the least of which is that the lighter one's eyes are, the more likely you're going to end up with those crazy eyes. If you're blue-eyed, watch out!

If you're in NYC, be sure to check out http://capworkshops.org - a few of my former students work there and they do some crazy alt-processing... Wanna work with Uranium? They do!
posted by blaneyphoto at 11:17 AM on January 25, 2014 [2 favorites]


Who's the older man with the big scarf around his neck and the "praying" hands? I can't decide if I almost-recognize him, or he just happens to remind me of a friend of mine.
posted by Greg_Ace at 12:41 PM on January 25, 2014


What I find fascinating is how some of the portraits have such an old feel through the falsity of sloppily done tintype.

I've been thinking about this since my earlier comment. I've been wondering how, exactly, future artists will treat their images in order to evoke the "authentic" feel of early 21st century digital images. While we, today, celebrate the clarity and "perfection" of the digital image, I have a feeling those future artists will be ladling-on the artifacts...random blockiness, pixelated posterization, and maybe even the "damaged jpeg" look of the bottom third of an image a solid gray. And, of course, it will be either a selfie or a cat.
posted by Thorzdad at 1:05 PM on January 25, 2014 [4 favorites]


Somebody should do an intervention on Philip Seymour Hoffman, I'm pretty sure he is going to kill himself in the next year.
posted by turbid dahlia at 4:14 PM on January 25, 2014 [15 favorites]


Katie Couric is not twenty anymore, so clearly, neither am I.
posted by halfbuckaroo at 5:48 PM on January 25, 2014


I really wish people who do this sort of thing realized that not all of us have a reliable ability to map celebrity faces to names (and possibly don't know -exactly- who many of these celebrities are in the first place). This would be 1000x more interesting to me if the pictures were labeled.
posted by jferg at 7:19 PM on January 25, 2014 [3 favorites]


Sphinx "Honorable mention to Don Johnson and Kurt Russell. Holy moly does the tintype bring out the weather in an older guys face."

I was struck by the same detail seeing Kurt Russell's photo. This reminded me of the famous "earliest dated daguerreotype", Boulevard du Temple, which fails to depicts the always busy Paris street as it really is because of the long exposure required by the film process. Likewise, Russell's photo depicts a 63 year old man in more interesting detail, than his smooth-skinned understudies.
posted by xtian at 7:04 AM on January 26, 2014 [1 favorite]


@ jamaro,
Enrico Colantoni / Lance Reddick

Maybe? Though he is the spitting image of Picasso

?/?? = ?/Cameron Monaghan ?
posted by xtian at 7:09 AM on January 26, 2014


Jonathan Pryce / Kurt Russell
posted by xtian at 7:20 AM on January 26, 2014 [1 favorite]


Thanks, xtian. As it happens, Jonathan Pryce with a beard actually does look remarkably similar to my friend.
posted by Greg_Ace at 9:34 AM on January 26, 2014


I'm sad she's removed PSH's photograph. :(
posted by crossoverman at 2:31 PM on February 2, 2014


I'm sad she's removed PSH's photograph. :(
It's still there on the inside link.
posted by unliteral at 3:00 PM on February 2, 2014


Somebody should do an intervention on Philip Seymour Hoffman, I'm pretty sure he is going to kill himself in the next year.

This is so terrible to read now. Just a week later.
posted by jokeefe at 5:54 PM on February 2, 2014 [2 favorites]


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