Tintype Workshop with Timothy Duffy
About the Workshop
Timothy Duffy visits the Ruby to share his tintype photography process—and make some collaborative prints. Several of his portraits are on view in (and on!) the Ruby in Music Maker 25: Selections from Timothy Duffy’s Blue Muse.
The tintype is an American innovation dating back to the nineteenth century. It requires coating a metal plate with a wet, syrupy solution that holds light-sensitive chemicals. The plate must then be placed immediately in the camera and exposed to the subject before it dries completely. The best tintypes often result from incidental effects of the process—drying too quickly, oversensitivity, or slight ripples in the surface of the emulsion. Working in either the studio with powerful lights that help speed up a typically long exposure time, or out in the field with his “wet plate wagon” (a portable darkroom trailer that he pulls with his truck), Duffy creates powerful images of musicians who are living expression of an important cultural legacy.
Stay after the workshop for an opening reception and artist talk, 6–8pm, with Timothy Duffy!
About the Instructor
Timothy Duffy is a renowned photographer and founder of the Music Maker Relief Foundation. Timothy has been recording and photographing traditional artists in the South since the age of 16, when he became interested in ethnomusicology. After earning a BA from Friends World College and MA from the Curriculum in Folklore at the UNC, Timothy and his wife Denise founded Music Maker Relief Foundation in 1994 to assist traditional musicians in need. Read more.
About the Location
This workshop will meet in the courtyard behind the Rubenstein Arts Center. If it is raining, an alternative workshop location in the Ruby will be announced the morning-of.
