Tim Brown | Photograph by Adam Williams
Overview: Tim Brown probably is most known for his tintype photography these days. But he also had many exciting years of globe-traveling as a rarely skilled kayaker-slash-adventure photographer. He talks about both with Adam.
As well as his dive into the mid-19th century techniques of tintype photography after opportunities for adventure photography dried up with the rise of digital technologies.
Tim also shares profound insights on heartbreak and healing, and about his fine art tintype series “Broken.”
SHOW NOTES, LINKS, CREDITS & TRANSCRIPT
The We Are Chaffee: Looking Upstream podcast is a collaboration with Chaffee County Public Health and the Chaffee Housing Authority, and is supported by the Colorado Public Health & Environment: Office of Health Disparities.
Along with being distributed on podcast listening platforms (e.g. Spotify, Apple), Looking Upstream is broadcast weekly at 2 p.m. on Tuesdays, on KHEN 106.9 community radio in Salida, Colo., and can be listened to on-demand via khen.org.
Tim Brown
Website: timbrownphotography.com
Instagram: instagram.com/timbrownphotography
Facebook: facebook.com/salidatintype
We Are Chaffee’s Looking Upstream
Website: wearechaffeepod.com
Instagram: instagram.com/wearechaffeepod
CREDITS
Looking Upstream Host, Producer, Photographer & Website Manager: Adam Williams
Looking Upstream Engineer & Producer: Jon Pray
We Are Chaffee Community Advocacy Coordinator: Lisa Martin
Director of Chaffee County Public Health and Environment: Andrea Carlstrom
TRANSCRIPT
Note: Transcripts are produced using a transcription service. Although it is largely accurate, minor errors inevitably exist.
[Intro music, guitar instrumental]
Adam Williams (00:15): Welcome to We Are Chaffee: Looking Upstream, a conversational podcast of community, humanness, and well-being rooted in Chaffee County, Colorado. I’m Adam Williams.
Today, I’m talking with Tim Brown, who probably is most known for his tintype photography these days, but also had many exciting years of globe traveling, kayaking adventures with a camera in hand before that. We talk about both.
He talks about his first professional photography job, which brought him from where he grew up in Boston to the Arkansas Valley in the early 1980s. So I asked him about life here in the ’80s and ’90s, including what housing affordability used to mean.
(00:51): Tim was a rarely skilled kayaker/adventure photographer during those years. “One of about three in the world,” he says, who could combine those skills like he could. It led him to shooting for the likes of Patagonia and other recognizable brands and for national magazines like National Geographic and Outside.
(01:08): That is until the technology of photography evolved from 35-millimeter film into the digital realm, and then onward with smartphones and social media, et cetera, making true masters of the craft like Tim seem less required. So Tim made a U-turn to the mid-19th century, and he dived into the far more manual and hands-on techniques of tintype photography.
(01:32): With that, we talk about Tim’s latest fine art series Broken, which highlights portraits and stories of divorce or otherwise significant relationship breakups. It’s a cathartic work of art, for Tim, for the portrait participants, and for the viewers of the work, Tim shares some truly profound insights on heartbreak and healing.
(01:53): The Looking Upstream podcast is supported by Chaffee County Public Health and the Chaffee Housing Authority. As with every Looking Upstream episode, show notes with photos, links, and a transcript of the conversation are published at our new website wearechaffeepod.com.
All right, now. Here is Tim Brown.
[Transition music, guitar instrumental]
Adam Williams (02:23): I know that you more or less are a lifelong photographer. So let’s just start at the start. I’m curious, what piqued your interest initially if you recall what it was that drew you to photography at the very beginning?
Tim Brown (02:33): Well, I would say it was probably my father. Growing up, he had Nikons and Polaroids, and he was just way into photography as a hobby, just shooting family stuff and all that. This is in the 1960s. So I grew up with these cool devices, around these cameras that are just techie, and something a boy would love, and watching him photograph all the time. And I think, yeah, at one point, I was like sixth grade, I asked for one for Christmas and I got a little Kodak Instamatic, and that kind of started the real passion for it.
By 16, I had an SLR and a dark room in my basement. So looking back, certainly, it makes sense that I’m doing what I’m doing forever, trying to make a living and make it work. And are you good enough, and all that? Certainly questioned myself for a long time. But now looking back at a long career, I’m like, “Oh, it makes sense.” And ultimately, I sort of wish my parents had me go to college for that because it was obvious like, “Hello?”
Adam Williams (03:38): What was it you went to college for? Or did you?
Tim Brown (03:40): I did for a business for two years, and it wasn’t my passion. I’m definitely more of a feeler, artsy type, and took a while to figure that out. But when I got the job out here is when all started.
Adam Williams (03:53): Did you feel like you weren’t allowed to choose what you wanted to study?
Tim Brown (03:59): Being sort of more of a quiet person, and you’re 18, you’re like, “What am I going to do with my life?” And people are asking you that. And of course, back then, my dad was a salesman and he loved that. That was his passion. So he’s talked to me a week after high school, I came into his room, and I was like, “Here it comes.” And he’s like, “You go to school for business and you get a sales job and you buy a house and get married and it’ll be great, Tim. You’ll have money.”
Adam Williams (04:30): Yeah, it is such a traditional, I guess, way of handling that and looking at it. Parents just wanted stability for their kids not to go into some creative form that they don’t necessarily understand as a career path.
Tim Brown (04:43): And even though my dad was way into photography too, I mean I thought he’d be more supportive. And not that he wasn’t, but I think he probably looked at it like, “Well, you need to make money. You got to make money.”
Adam Williams (04:55): Right. You mentioned a dark room. You built that dark room, right, when you were a teenager?
Tim Brown (05:00): Yeah, it was in my basement. Kind of a windowless basement, so I just got some black plastic and made an 8×8 foot square room. Probably wasn’t any ventilation or anything, but I did mostly black and white.
Adam Williams (05:14): How did you learn how to do that? There wasn’t YouTube back then. And we were saying what? The ’70s?
Tim Brown (05:18): Yeah, it would’ve been like ’76 or so.
Adam Williams (05:20): Okay.
Tim Brown (05:22): There was a guild in our nearby town that did art workshops and all kinds of things, and they offered photography, so I did their black-and-white course, and got pretty excited by that.
Adam Williams (05:35): What had your dad been doing with his film when he was being a hobbyist photographer? Was he just having someone else develop it or did he go somewhere, and did he know how to do it?
Tim Brown (05:45): Yeah. No, he never did development. He shot color on his Nikon or he just shot a lot of Polaroids too back when that was the camera. But no, his was just mostly snapshots, family mostly, just travel and kids, and things like that. He never really got into doing artsy stuff. He’d do a little landscapey things, but he wasn’t really passionate about that. He just liked to document the family, I think.
Adam Williams (06:14): When you were a kid and you got your first camera around age 11 or so, it sounds like, were you going around the neighborhood and photographing friends, looking more artistically at things, or was it also kind of the family vacation holiday type thing like your dad might’ve been doing?
Tim Brown (06:31): I was definitely a little more creative. I remember I used to play a lot of street hockey back then going up in Boston where everybody played street hockey, and we’d do these little setup shots like making a save or a slap shot or just little artsy setup shot. We’d have to hang the tennis ball by a string that’d look like it’s in the air and have the goalie with a glove near it. I do little stuff like that.
Adam Williams (06:57): You brought your friends into it. They became sort of models and collaborators in a way.
Tim Brown (07:03): Yeah. And it was one of those Instamatic cameras, just had a little cube flash, you know?
Adam Williams (07:08): Okay. Yeah.
Tim Brown (07:09): And you get, what was it? 12 pictures or something, little cartridge, and so. There wasn’t a whole lot of creative controls with the camera. You had to shoot during the day or you put the flash cube on. So it was pretty simple. And the shot, it made a square print with a white border. It’s pretty cool.
Yeah. So I don’t really remember. I didn’t shoot a ton probably because it was expensive back then for me especially. But yeah, I had the camera with me. When I got the SLR when I was 16, that’s when things got more serious. Yeah.
Adam Williams (07:43): Was that also a gift or by that time had you been doing something to save money?
Tim Brown (07:48): Yeah, I did. I was working after school, and so I went in and bought a used Pentax.
Adam Williams (07:54): What was the job you got? What was your first job?
Tim Brown (07:58): I worked in a nursing home.
Adam Williams (08:00): As a teenager?
Tim Brown (08:01): Yep. After school, I was like the housekeeper. So I go and clean the rooms and clean the hallways and all that. I did that for a couple of years.
Adam Williams (08:09): How did you come to that? Because that strikes me as an unusual opportunity for a teenager to take because I know how I felt as a kid when I would go with family to a nursing home or something and be in that environment, and those smells, and just what’s going on there. It was a piece of life I suppose that as a kid, I would largely be unaware of until I would walk in there and see, “Oh, there’s some other end of this line.”
Tim Brown (08:36): Absolutely. Well, for one thing, it was an after-school job that was available, so it worked for my going to high school hours, and it was near my house. And I really liked it. I mean, I really liked the people in there. Sort of surprised by that, but unfortunately, nursing homes, I mean that was 40 years ago, but most people in there are lonely.
They don’t get many visitors, and so the staff become their friends and family. So even a sixteen-year-old Tim Brown could go in every room and sweep and mop and clean the bathrooms and empty the trash. It was like you’d get to talk to them and make the day a little better maybe.
Adam Williams (09:20): You just reminded me that as a kid, when I was really young, my family would go to nursing homes and play and sing music together to be visitors.
Tim Brown (09:31): Oh, man.
Adam Williams (09:31): To be people who would cheer others up, and I’ve totally forgotten about that memory for decades.
Tim Brown (09:37): Yeah, that’s-
Adam Williams (09:37): But we used to do that.
Tim Brown (09:39): That’s great. I mean, I met some great people in there and became close to them because again, they didn’t have much.
Adam Williams (09:48): Let’s talk about that part of your life where you went after college to your first job, your first photography job. And as I understand, it was around the time you were 21. It was coming out from Boston to Colorado, and somehow involved with photographing rafting, is that right?
Tim Brown (10:06): Yep. They still do it now. There’s the companies that sit by a rapid and photograph the tourists and then make it available when they get back to the office, whatever, and they can buy an 8×10. So, for me, I had a friend who worked for my dad who was very outdoorsy, so he and I… He was older than me, but we would go skiing up in Vermont and New Hampshire a lot and just do outdoor things.
And he guided out here for a year, and so he was like, “Oh, there’s these companies out there that photograph the rafts.” And so he gave me the name of the rafting company of which I called them, and it was like in January. And they were like, “Well, we don’t do it, but here’s the name of the company that does it.” I called them and they do typically the ski photos in the winter. Rivers summer, ski winter.
(10:55): And it was January. So the guy picked up the phone, he was like, “Yeah, come to Salida Colorado in May.” That’s all he said. “Here’s an address.” And he goes, “You needed an 8o to 200 lens and a motor drive.” So I loaded up my car with my brother and we went to New York City and I did have a Nikon body at that time. I got an 8200 and a motor drive and we came out to Salida. And Salida was barely on the map. And I remember the plan was, “Well, we’ll go there. If I get the job, we’ll stay, and you’ll try to get a job. And if not, then we will keep going to California, do a road trip, and go back home.”
(11:33): When I came here, I got the job right in the spot because when I went to the location, in their office, I was like, “Hey, it’s Tim Brown.” And he was like, “Who are you?” And I was like, “I called you in January. Remember, you told me to come to Salida, Colorado.” And he was so blown away that I came out there and bought the lens and motor drive without even having the job. He was like, “You’re hired.” You know what I mean? He was like, “That guy. He [inaudible 00:12:02].” For him, it was maybe one of 50 calls in the winter like, “Well, come to Salida in May, we’ll talk.”
Adam Williams (12:08): Sure.
Tim Brown (12:09): Who knows if this guy can take pictures, right?
Adam Williams (12:11): If they’ll even show up or invest like you did in the equipment.
Tim Brown (12:15): And so it was really kind of a neat moment there, and I didn’t even realize that. I just had all these hopes. I hope they hire in me, and I’ll drive to Salida. And Salida was just an absolute ghost town too. I mean that was pretty-
Adam Williams (12:28): We’re talking more than 40 years ago at this point.
Tim Brown (12:31): ’82, yeah.
Adam Williams (12:32): Your history here, it runs long. And you’re saying it was a ghost town. If we take a side trail here for a moment, I’m curious, as somebody who’s not been here for 42 years, what was it you were seeing then, and then your feelings on maybe the evolution or change that you have seen through the decades here?
Tim Brown (12:57): Well, at the beginning, it was right after Climax closed, which really put a lot of people out of jobs. So again, it was, I don’t want to use the word ghost town, but certainly, at least half the buildings were just closed up. There weren’t stores in them. There was remnants of the ’40s, ’50s, and ’60s. It was a well worth. I mean, there was some pretty neat old businesses that were still surviving, but mostly it was just really quiet but also just super friendly.
(13:34): Everyone just waved and smiled. No matter who you were, no matter what age you were, walking down the street, people would just look in your eye, and say, “Hi.” And I mean, it’ll only be two people walking down the street. I remember always, for years, through the ’80s, looking up F Street or E or G, just as a little thing I liked to do to see how many cars you could see. How many cars were driving?
Or on F Street, how many were parked? And it’d always be like one or two, always just one or two cars parked in all of downtown. And it’s funny. Now and then, I remember that I still kind of gauge that today. I look up and oh, wow, cars everywhere and 10 cars driving and all that.
Adam Williams (14:15): I assume it was far more affordable then.
Tim Brown (14:18): Oh my gosh, yeah.
Adam Williams (14:20): Do you remember what… I don’t know what… Did you have another job say or maybe what the wages were you got for that first photography job?
Tim Brown (14:27): Man, you could… I mean, that was a wonderful thing about Salida and a lot of places like it. Back then, you could live on nothing. I mean the living was cheap.
Adam Williams (14:36): Affording rent in an apartment or house.
Tim Brown (14:38): Yeah and rent, I mean, a couple of years, like summers, I’d always did the river thing, the photography. So in the summers, I’d camp out. I’d live with the raft company or be camping somewhere.
Adam Williams (14:51): Was that just to save money on rent, but also to be part of that community, like the raft guides during the day?
Tim Brown (14:57): It was more a part of the community, for sure. I’m outdoorsy, so I got way into river running so I started kayaking a year later, and I just loved the lifestyle and the people. It was very wild and free and all that. And raft guides, it’s a great group of people.
So when I started doing my own photos in the river, the raft company is always based somewhere. A lot of them, right in the river, the ones I’ve worked for were, so everybody camped out and lived outside.
Adam Williams (15:26): Just for some perspective, do you by chance remember numbers in terms of what rent might’ve cost or what the wages were that you earned, or I don’t know, a gallon of milk? What is our context here on where cost used to be to where we are now?
Tim Brown (15:43): I know rent was around 200.
Adam Williams (15:45): For what?
Tim Brown (15:46): For a two-bedroom, little railroad shack, a brick home in town because I lived in a couple of them. A lot of times, you could live for free. There was a lot if… Word of mouth, people just wanted their house care taken. So there was a few homes I lived in just a few winters. I didn’t pay anything because it was just ask around and there’s an empty house, and they’d like someone in there, pay for the heat or something.
Adam Williams (16:12): Which now, might go to Airbnb or some sort of short-term rental because it becomes an income source for somebody to also have the house being used, doesn’t it?
Tim Brown (16:22): Absolutely.
Adam Williams (16:23): Those times maybe are generally passed.
Tim Brown (16:27): For sure. I did caretake a cabin up Ute Trail one winter, which was free other than it was way up there. And if it snowed, I was sort of snowed in until I could get out. But that was a real special. That was I think my third winter. Second, or third, second winter out here, and it was an amazing experience. It was like 10,000 feet. It was a cabin that was kind of off the grid and it was just me by myself and day and night and day and night and it was pretty amazing.
Adam Williams (17:00): How many years are we talking? I mean, this started in your early 20s. Through what age are we saying that this was your lifestyle before you got married and kind of went on with that phase of life?
Tim Brown (17:15): After that first year of doing the Whitewater Photography for the company, it was great. They taught me how to do it. They were great people, but they weren’t, in my opinion, all that creative. They wanted to be up high, so you’d always get faces. But the lower you get, the more bigger the water looks, the bigger the waves look, the more action, and all that.
And also using other lenses and stuff because at that point, I was way into creative photography, and well, why not use a wide angle and do this or that? So I went out on my own and found a company that I just shot for. I was their photographer, and not all of the companies, just one. I got a contract with them.
And I did that for quite a while, 12 or 13 years. You know, actually, it was about 10 years. And then I sold that company and that gave me $40,000, which back then was a ton. And so I bought a house in Salida for $28,000.
Adam Williams (18:14): Wow.
Tim Brown (18:15): And a Toyota truck.
Adam Williams (18:17): Wow. What size was the house?
Tim Brown (18:19): It was like one little small brick bungalow, I think it was 800 square feet, just like a lot of them. It was on East Third Street. Neat little home, needed to be renovated, and all this and that but it was great. Yeah, I mean it was paid for. And I remember when I first walked in, I had a duffel bag of my river gear. I had a duffel bag of my clothes, the very few clothes, and I had my camera equipment. I walk into this house after living in tents and cars for years, and it’s just all this space. I had no furniture or anything. But yeah, I mean the house was 28 grand, so it was-
Adam Williams (19:00): That’s amazing.
Tim Brown (19:00): Thank God I bought it for sure.
Adam Williams (19:02): Yeah. Well, and of course, that turns it into a nice investment when the decades roll on.
Tim Brown (19:07): Now, it’s that house up on Methodist. It’s an amazing house worth a ton of money up in Methodist. I just kept buying and selling. I get married, buy, get a bigger house, fix it up, sell it, this and that.
Adam Williams (19:18): Keep rolling it up.
Tim Brown (19:19): Yeah, so I mean they-
Adam Williams (19:20): And the house on Methodist you’re referring to is also where you have your studio now.
Tim Brown (19:24): Yep.
Adam Williams (19:25): Before we get to all of that, I want to stay on this flow here with your photography with adventure and water. Because it would lead to commercial photography and traveling around the world and shooting for sizable brands and national publications, things like that. And so I’m curious for some of those stories or experiences you have to share maybe on that.
Tim Brown (19:48): Well, what happened was pretty quickly, I got into kayaking. And then I would put my camera gear and Pelican boxes and put it in my boat. So then I started kayaking along with the trips, and then I could photograph them at every rapid rather than just sitting there at one, again, opening up more creative opportunities, shoot this rapid with a 400, shoot this rapid with a wide angle, and something to offer the guest more like, “Wow, here’s 10 pictures of five different rapids.”
And it was really exciting way to work too. Every day I got in my boat and had my camera in there, and the only challenge was it was film, so at some point, I had to bomb ahead of the group, solo paddle out of whichever canyon I was working in, and get back to the river company where I had a dark room and develop the film. And I shot slide film, so I’d develop the slides and then do a little slideshow and take print orders.
Adam Williams (20:45): How would you get back? Who’s waiting on the other end to be able to drive you back?
Tim Brown (20:49): Yeah, I would set up a shuttle with my company too. So one way or another, whatever section we photographed or they were in, they had a commercial guest, they always set a shuttle to leave the bus of the takeout, so I would just be involved in their shuttle. So my car is always there. So basically, again, after I’d photographed the first four or five rapids, I just start marathoning out of there.
Adam Williams (21:14): How did that lead to opportunities with brands like Patagonia or Outside magazine? I mean any number of them. I don’t recall. You have a bunch of them on your website.
Tim Brown (21:23): Yeah. Mostly, as I got better at photography, and I just started selling the mostly kayak photos, but some rafting just commercially or editorial and just submitting the magazines and all that. Eventually, most of the business I did was advertising for the clothing, Patagonia gear, life jackets, helmets, kayaks, rafts, just any gear related to river running.
And as I got better at kayaking, I started traveling around the world and kayaking. And so it gave me a great advantage because there was only a couple of boaters that were photographers that could kayak class 5 too. So it really gave me an amazing competitive edge because I’m one of three people in the world that can kayak hard rivers and come out with photos. You know what I mean?
After a while, I would… I used to work in Chile. I spent six winters in Chile photographing down there. And what I would do is I would get a group of people together, and I’d get all the gear from the manufacturers. I was like, “Okay, here. Wear this gear. Take this kayak.” They’d give me all the gear, and so I’d be down there for a month running these rivers, and anytime I took a picture, well, they’re going to have the helmet on, the life jacket, the clothing, so I’d come back from those trips with a ton of photos and send them all to my clients.
Adam Williams (22:50): It sounds like a very romantic type of sexy kind of job that a lot of people would love to just plant themselves by you at a party and just say, “Tell me all about this exciting thing.” And you did that through the ’80s and ’90s, right?
Tim Brown (22:50): Yeah.
Adam Williams (23:05): And I’m guessing, and of course, I want to hear your take on this. I feel like that might’ve been kind of the lucrative nature of that running its course. Because then, we’re running into digital photography, internet, social media, all the way up to now with AI capacities that people can create images that they want without even sending a photographer or model’s products out there. So what has that been like for you to go from that period where you’re traveling the world and doing these amazing things with this amazing combination of skills that is so admirable to me, by the way, to realize the world is changing, technology’s changing.
Tim Brown (23:45): Yeah, great point. Because honestly, when digital came, I started one by one losing a lot of my clients, and I could have continued shooting for them. But what happened was, all of a sudden, there’s 22 million more photographers, and in every category too. I mean, a lot of kayakers could suddenly get a nice camera that would shoot auto and shoot autofocus and they could get good photos. So a lot of good boaters that were sponsors. They’d be like, “Hey, sponsor me and I’ll give you free photos.”
(24:23): Or even the industry, it was just so easy to… It became such a buyer’s market for photography. And it was easy to submit too, rather than having you shoot slides and you have to make duplicates and then FedEx them off and all that, and it’d be 20 pictures they look at. All of a sudden, you can just quickly email an image. So all these companies would get flooded with tons of pictures, and they could… Out of the 500 they get, there’s certainly going to be three really good ones.
So anyway, long story short, a lot of the river industry especially just started… They would say, “Well, we can’t afford you anymore.” Because I was charging normal rates, advertising rates that film photographers did for years, and that was good, but it was more like, “Hey, we can get it for free now.”
Adam Williams (25:11): The technical capabilities with film and those technologies prior to this era, they really required some knowledge and some skill and experience. And you mentioned a motor drive being one of those pieces that you bought, that was to help you shoot in, I don’t know if you would do burst or if you could hold down and shoot a number in fast sequence, but because you’re shooting film, you can’t run that up-
Tim Brown (25:37): No.
Adam Williams (25:37): … into the thousands on a tiny memory storage card like you can with digital now. You still had to be selective.
Tim Brown (25:45): 36 pictures.
Adam Williams (25:46): And then you’re swapping rolls on the river.
Tim Brown (25:49): Absolutely.
Adam Williams (25:50): And having to keep hold of that tangible piece that. Yeah, there’s so much to that. And it feels like somehow a loss, that skilled, knowledgeable, technical photographers no longer could get the livelihood that they once did. It’s like the companies are saying, “Well, hey, this is good enough.” And now somebody on a smartphone’s got, “Yeah, it’s good enough. It’s free.”
Tim Brown (26:13): Yeah, I mean, certainly. Definitely, a lot of the clients I had that I felt the quality went down too. But again, first of all, it’s free or cheap. And also, with the design programs, you could do all kinds of cool things on the page that made the picture look better or Photoshop it or whatever. Yeah, I mean, definitely late ’90s, or actually early 2000s is when I converted to digital.
And again, that’s when it became such a buyer’s market that I was like… I mean, at that point, I had two little kids. And it wasn’t like I could just take less money. I wasn’t a dirtbag living in a van anymore, and I can afford to take your $100. It was like, “Well, I can’t afford to do this.” You know what I mean? So I had to switch directions is what I eventually did.
(27:07): But also regarding film, one of the great advantages of being a photographer back then was film was hard, and especially color. It didn’t lie. If the light sucked, then the picture didn’t look great, and you couldn’t fix it. Same with if there’s anything in the image that nowadays you can Photoshop out, there are so many times that I could have gotten an amazing image and lighting, everything’s there, but it’s like, “Wow, there’s that telephone pole, or there’s a big blue dumpster in the background.”
And be like, “No, I’m not going to take the picture.” And I really think of how many times just… Everyone was like that though. It was just, “Well, nope. The telephone wire running across the frame, it’s going to look like a scratch. You can’t do that.”
(27:51): And also lighting too. Again, good lighting, that Fujichrome good slide film would just glow, but bad lighting, that would just be horrible. So as professionally, you couldn’t just shoot any time. It was always like, “Okay, the light needs to be lower or higher or it needs to be cloudy or something like that.”
Adam Williams (28:11): A lot more factors to take into account.
Tim Brown (28:14): And you’re shooting manual, so you had really… And manually shooting film, there’s not a whole lot of latitude, especially slide film. So if you are over or underexposed by even a stop, you sort of ruin the image. And you had to pre-focus. It was all focusing. You had to focus with your hands and your eyes. And the motor drives weren’t even that fast either. They were maybe like three to five frames per second.
So it wasn’t like you could just hold the motor drive down and get the one. Even the motor drives are sort of limiting. It’s why you see so much amazing photography now, especially action photos. And the wildlife shots you’re seeing now are just so beautiful because these lenses are just so fast for focusing, and you can put everything on automatic. I see so many photos now. That would’ve been impossible with film and manual lenses back then, or you’re just really lucky.
Adam Williams (29:05): Right. Technology allows for that spray-and-pray approach without having to choose the moment, just hit the button, and then you choose the one that came out closest to what you would’ve liked.
Tim Brown (29:19): A little easier. I mean, it still takes skill, but definitely, yep, the gear. I mean, it’s an amazing time in photography right now. Even though I’ve gone a hundred percent analog, I just think, “Wow, look.” And understanding the roots of photography, which is what I do now, and seeing where it’s come to, and just thinking about all these photographers back then, that just like, how amazing it would’ve been for them. I mean, they were shooting black and white, and challenges and these lenses that weren’t that great and chemicals. And boy, what’s come to now is just pretty phenomenal, I think.
Adam Williams (29:52): I’m very grateful that as a photographer myself, to the extent that I am in relation to you, that I was at the very end of film, black and white dark rooms, working with Tri-X and developing before digital really started emerging. And I’m just really grateful that I at least got that much of history in my hands and working with this stuff before moving on.
And of course, you have this really broad history of knowledge and experience that not only is including the film that we’re talking about where you’re shooting a 35 millimeter and doing this work, but after… I’m going to ask, I guess now, is it when digital and the prices went down on your ability to make a livelihood, is that when you went to tintype? Which is kind of going opposite the direction of technology. Technology’s coming up, and now you got smartphones, and you got all these things coming along, but you’re working with something that’s from the 19th century, right?
Tim Brown (30:50): Yeah. Yeah. 1850s.
Adam Williams (30:52): Tintype’s from going on 200 years ago, and you’re doing the legitimate processes with that. Why or how did you come to that, and was it actually a direct response to the fact that your work was drying up when digital came along?
Tim Brown (31:12): Yeah, a good question. I would say, for one thing, one of the things I didn’t like. Before, photographers in the past, and let’s say a travel photographer like myself, 90% of my time was traveling and taking pictures, 10… And then you get all this slide film back. You throw it on your light table. Look at it with a loop. Your editing took 10 minutes, and then send it off to your clients. All of a sudden, it went from that to, I would say, 10% shooting, 90% sitting in front of a computer.
That’s what I really didn’t like, was just physically sitting in front of the computer all day long, and my back and my neck and just my eyes, and I’m not outside. I mean, photography has become sort of you’re like a computer person. And so yeah, every time you take a hundred photos, you need to edit those, and then back them up and size them and resize them and send them to your clients.
(32:12): And then a year or two later, when hard drives changed, everything changed, well, I got to get them on a different hard drive because this one’s going to be obsolete. You back… Those are your negatives. You don’t have this physical filing cabinet where you can find an image, any image in the last 20 or 30 years. I still have file cabinets on my slides. It would take me two minutes to find a picture I took in ’85. It was all categorized. But to find a digital photo, I took 10 years ago, I was like, “Oh, what hard drive is that in? And oh where is it? There’s a million photos.” But yeah, that’s one thing. That was the first thing that I didn’t like was just, wow, I’m just sitting in front of a computer all the time.
Adam Williams (32:53): There are infinite choices possible there too. You’re talking about how technically proficient you have to be with film and with slide in particular, and you can’t be too under or overexposed or it’s just, it’s out. It’s not going to be the image because you can’t remove that power line that’s cutting through back then. And now you can. Especially with AI generative fill and different things you can spend forever at that computer enhancing and tweaking and Photoshopping and creatively making it what you want it to be.
Tim Brown (33:24): Absolutely.
Adam Williams (33:24): You can just go forever.
Tim Brown (33:27): And also, everybody’s doing that too. I think there’s a certain… There’s a little bit of similarity in a lot of photography now because everyone’s using the same tools. And a lot of people, especially color, they bump the saturation up a lot and things like that. It’s like, “Okay.” But yeah, I think… And also, I did a workshop early in the digital days and the first thing they said was, “There’s 22 million new photographers out there now in this country.”
And that’s a huge number. And it’s another reason why it’s become such a buyer’s market because a lot of the newer photographers really, they either don’t have the confidence or are afraid to charge a lot of money or want to be cheap so they can get work because of so much more competition.
(34:19): All of a sudden, I was getting an equal amount of calls, let’s say, locally. But they’d ask me, I’d get a quote, and it’d be like a thousand dollars, and then I’d never hear back. And it just always happened. And I would even see later on, on Facebook or something like, “Oh, that photographer got the job, and they charged $150, and they gave them all the digital files.” And so I did just start seeing, “Okay, I might want to be careful about the direction I’m going.” I mean, there’s always room at the top and it’s still great money to be made, and even now as a photographer, but certainly, way more competitive.
(34:55): And really, I’ve always been about lifestyle. I’ve wanted to live in the mountains. And I knew it took a big pay cut by choosing to live in Salida, where there’s not much local work at all. But ’80s and ’90s, no one was buying photography. And being far away from the city where the bigger jobs are, so I was like, “Well, I’m taking a pay cut because I’m living in this beautiful place, and it’s worth it for me.”
It was definitely all about the lifestyle. I never wanted to work 60 hours a week and go crazy and make myself rich. But it was more like I do a good sale and have some money that last on a couple of months, and rather than market, I’d go kayaking.
Adam Williams (35:36): Yeah. Yeah, I understand that. And so you ended up opening up a tintype photography business for portraiture. Was that again, I’m going to come back to, I think the question, was that directly your response to the technology and what was going on with everything you’re describing? How did you decide, “I’m going to go back a couple of hundred years and make this my focus and expertise”? Because now, you’ve got to be a very rare person in that field who has truly the legitimate skills of it.
Tim Brown (36:10): Yeah, good. Yeah. Pretty much, it was I bought that building downtown, lived downtown. I had a studio. And I was just still doing my regular commercial work. I was doing a lot of fine art too, actually. Honestly, once I stopped traveling and shooting Whitewater, I had so many images from traveling around the world of just beautiful places that I started doing art shows and just selling big fine art prints of landscapes and neat buildings in India, whatever.
And so probably about six or seven years into that, I started seeing tintypes on Facebook, this one guy out of Denver. And I didn’t know much about it other than I loved the look. It was just beautiful, the lenses, the shallow tip of the field, and all that.
(37:00): I just followed him for a while and I just thought he seemed pretty amazing. And I knew it was tintypes. I didn’t know what year or anything about it. And when I purchased this building downtown, I was fixing it up, and I was going to have my grand opening. And so I wanted to do something different for that. So I thought, “I’m going to take a workshop from this guy and do some tintype portraits, and that’ll just be part of my opening, not like I’m going to do this just something unique and different from my grand opening.”
(37:31): And when I went to his workshop, I was in there about 30 minutes and I was like, “Whoa, this is so me. I mean, just the whole technique. The way this guy was, the way he lived, and the way he looked at photography.” And I was just pretty blown away. At that moment, I was like, “I would love to… I want to do this.” So I had my opening, and it was a good response. And also, I started booking people. So it probably took about two or three years. I was just doing that full time.
Adam Williams (38:09): My family came to you for a session. I assume you remember.
Tim Brown (38:15): Yeah.
Adam Williams (38:16): My wife and I both have photography backgrounds and we’re still… It was fascinating to learn from you about the process and the history with tintype photography. And it was just a very cool experience to… I assume you share that with a lot of people, maybe everybody you have a session with but it was a very cool thing to do. And then I also was back with you on an individual basis once and got to have a different experience.
Well, I’ll acknowledge you’re the only photographer I’ve ever taken my shirt off for by the way. And the reason I bring that up is because some of your photographs, your portraits, I think maybe when they’re in the more artful sort of intention that you’re having with a subject is you do kind of a shirtless thing. And I feel a difference between the ones where you have people put on period apparel, and maybe where I show up wearing my regular clothes, and then when I have the one without my shirt, that’s the one that’s my favorite as it turns out.
(39:19): And I’m curious for your take creatively, on what your interest is in having people put on clothes that are from an older time when they’re wearing their modern contemporary fashion. And then when you say, “Hey, are you open to this?” And I pull my tarp off and you’re photographing me with bare shoulders and chest. What do you see and feel in those differences?
Tim Brown (39:44): Well, one thing is I don’t really advertise myself as an old-time photo studio. At the very beginning, I thought that’s what I was going to do because that’s what it was. But when I looked into buying 30 sets of clothes, of vintagey clothes of all four different sizes and all that, if I wanted to think it was a ton of money, like, “Oh, okay, I can’t afford that.” And also, as I did more and more portraits, I realized that the portraits are just sort of…
I just thought they were very beautiful, somewhat vulnerable, having people not smile. It’s a very gritty process. It can make you look older. It can make your skin look leathery. And these old lenses. And you’re sitting there in front of the lens for a couple of seconds, which as you know, most people, all of us, we always get a little self-conscious in front of a camera, even an iPhone.
(40:35): Here you’re looking into this huge camera with this mega brass lens, and it’s a long exposure, and people really have to look inside to feel comfortable and to look good too because I always tell this to my clients, it’s like, “If you look good in this process, it makes you look amazing. If you look a little awkward or you’re a little insecure, it’s going to make you look even worse too.”
But anyway, yeah, a majority of people I photographed, especially at the beginning, we just have the regular clothes on. I would just say, “Wear black. I like a black top just because it’s not distracting. All your eye just goes right to the person’s face and all that.” And plus, I’m shooting chest up, shooting pretty close.
(41:16): And the old lenses put everything out of focus, but your eyes, so quite often, shirts get kind of blurry. So yeah, really that’s my favorite photos I’ve ever taken with tintypes. It’s always, you never know. It’s not like I find someone. It’s like, “Who’s going to come to the door today? What kind of look are they going to have? Are they going to be a little vulnerable?” It’s going to be just that one moment when I uncover the lens, and they’re going to have a certain look into the camera.
(41:44): Plus the chemical aspect, it’s not a hundred percent predictable either. The chemical, that’s the hardest part about this process is the chemicals. They’re very unstable, not in a dangerous way, but just they get contaminated. They’re very affected by heat and humidity and temperature and pH and all that, so we’re always wrestling with the chemicals to have them all be at a sweet spot. But ultimately, yeah, I think the portraiture, it’s very personal. And even though if the people want to, they can smile. I like the whole no-smile thing, which is what they did back then.
Again, it’s just different. It’s very compelling. And because you’re not smiling, and it’s not in color, it really shows who you really are. And especially physically, face structure, often people will be like, “Wow, I can see my dad or my grandfather or someone.” Because you just need someone just looking at the camera without a smile and then it’s not color. It’s not all these distracting things like, “Oh, I’m happy, I’m smiling.” It’s just like your face.
Adam Williams (42:43): It feels performative to me if I’m having to smile for a camera. I agree with you that I prefer as a photographer that people don’t smile necessarily unless it just really is who they are. And they’re just always that happy-
Tim Brown (42:58): Yeah, good point.
Adam Williams (42:59): … bubbly person. It’s like, “Okay, be yourself.” But in general, if for anybody who’s been curious about why a lot of the portraits I do related to this podcast are without smiles, I think more often than not, people appreciate. They feel relieved that they’re not being asked to perform that smile, which then makes them feel awkward and self-conscious instead of just being able to be their face.
And I love the way you just described how that… Because I haven’t necessarily always been able to put words to why or what it is I feel in doing it that way. But to be able to see their face structure and see who they are physically represented anyway, I like that as well.
Tim Brown (43:38): And again, I never knew who’s going to come to the door, and all my best images are from clients, people that came, and it wasn’t like I seeked out someone who looks a certain way, and a lot of it was just their moment. Sometimes, I’ll create a plate of someone like, “Wow, can I create one more so I can have one for myself.” Because with the tintypes, they’re the original negative, and that gets given away, so I don’t have any of my original work, which is, back in the day was you never gave the negative way.
But that’s what I’m selling is the tintype. So sometimes, I’ll try to recreate that image like, “Can I do one more?” And they wanted me to do it quite often. It’s just that moment I pull the hat off the lens and maybe just they squinted a little bit or they raised their eyebrow or just something. But no two are ever alike. And I learned pretty quickly. Like I said, I’ve tried to duplicate a look that I had five minutes ago, and they couldn’t do it.
Adam Williams (44:37): In that sense, it’s like fine art that a painter, it’s a one-off, and they sell it and it’s in somebody else’s house or whatever it is, but they don’t get to keep hold of that for themselves. And this is the photography, I guess, representation of that kind of experience for you as the artist. I think that would be hard to let go of them when you really love a portrait you’ve made, it’s like, “Oh, but this is for you.”
Tim Brown (45:02): Yeah. I scan them and get a digital version just for myself or marketing or make prints, but it’s special too because the other thing I love about wet plate collodion, which is what it’s technically called is, everyone’s handmade one at a time. It’s pure silver glued to tin. They last up to 500 years. So their natural longevity is amazing. They didn’t do that on purpose. It’s just what the chemicals do.
And shooting through these beautiful old lenses that were made by hand 170 years ago, and all the people whose light back then went through the same lens and made a tintype, and here your light’s going to go through the same glass that was shaped by hand by in the 1860s is pretty special, I think.
Adam Williams (45:55): It is. I want to ask you about an art series that I think you recently started exhibiting called Broken. Is that right?
Tim Brown (46:05): Yup.
Adam Williams (46:06): And it relates to divorce or a similar significant breakup. And I’m curious about your motivation for that project. What’s behind it and how you went about it?
Tim Brown (46:18): Well, first of all, the idea came out of my own heartache or breakup, and I was just in that space, which, as we all know, when you’ve been heartbroken or divorced or whatever, a breakup, it’s a difficult time. Okay? And so I was experiencing that. And I met a friend in Del Norte who had a general store. We had a business relationship. I did pop-ups over there. And she had a bunch of old wedding dresses and skulls. And before this idea even came up, as a tintype photographer, I thought, “Boy, how cool to get some women in wedding dresses and holding skulls just as a creative portrait thing.”
(47:08): Well, it turns out to get to know this person who owned the general store, she was in the midst of a divorce too, so we started become friends and just started sharing what we were going through, the whole healing stage, and the pain and all that. And at one point, because heartache can just last for so long, it just takes time. And at one point, we were on the phone, and I was like, “Is there some way we could just put this onto a tintype?
Put what we’re experiencing onto an image and do a show.” And so we thought it was kind of a neat idea. So because she had the wedding dresses and skulls, or our idea was we’re going to have a dozen or so women that were in the midst of heartache or breakup and divorce in the moment, and we’d put them in a wedding dress and they would mask themselves with a skull, so no one could tell they were. And then we’d ask them to write up to 400 words of what they were experiencing. And that was kind of it.
And the mask would be so they could be very raw and vulnerable without concern of who’s going to see it because we were just going to do the show locally, and most of the people were local, so we didn’t want to have a show where it shows them saying all these horrible things, whatever, about their ex or just upsetting people. And again, we didn’t want them to feel self-conscious about people knowing what they were writing and yeah.
(48:31): We found six women, then we thought, “Well, we should do men too.” And so the men, we did just sort of nude basically. And the same thing, holding skulls. And the interesting thing was at the beginning we thought, “Boy, how are we going to find 12 people that are willing to do this?” I thought it’d be really hard. And we each compiled a list of people we know who are breaking up or divorcing, which is happening all the time, and we found our 12 people in three days. It wasn’t hard to do.
Adam Williams (49:04): That’s sad, right?
Tim Brown (49:04): Yeah.
Adam Williams (49:06): But of course, that’s… Yeah. And everybody has that experience, whether it’s current or in the past.
Tim Brown (49:07): Exactly.
Adam Williams (49:12): It’s a very heartfelt human experience that we can all connect to in some way.
Tim Brown (49:13): Absolutely.
Adam Williams (49:19): That grief and recovery from it. You said when they were going through the process or it was fresh anyway, and I imagine that’s key to expressing and maybe getting out of them, maybe part of the healing is to deal with it in the moment, because as time goes on, of course, we tend, most of us tend to heal from that and move forward.
And then well, what would that… Yes, you have a divorce in your past or a breakup in your past, but how would that show? So I think, I’m curious about what you saw in raw expression because I’ve not had a chance to see the exhibition. So if you can share what kinds of things came out of that, whether that’s personally between you and the subject, and for yourself because you were in that space. Yeah, just what was that real human heartfelt level of experience for you?
Tim Brown (50:13): It was amazing. I mean, for one thing, the first shoot we did, we had all the women come together at one day and we planned a whole day of food and stylizing and doing these tintypes, which as you know, it takes time. And we asked everyone to write their story first. So when they first came, we went around the table and everyone sort of shared their story, and that was very touching. And pretty quickly, everyone started seeing how, “Wow, this is a healing thing too.”
Because one thing about breakup that I learned from this is one thing it’s so common. Every song or movie is either about being in love or breaking up. I mean, it’s the human tragedy and condition that’s been going on forever. So I was like, “Is this just a tacky show like another story of that we’ve seen so much.” But when I saw the healing going on just by people talking about it, I thought that was really powerful.
(51:12): And the same thing happened with the men. But also one thing I really learned too is even in his day and age, there’s so much availability for healing and therapy and all of that, that when you’re in this heartbroken state, you’re just really alone. And really the society doesn’t support it a whole lot for men. Men don’t talk a lot. And maybe your friend would be like, “Oh, let’s go have a bunch of beers and watch football or something.”
And women heal much quicker and faster because they communicate more and they deal with it more, and they share with other women and they get more support. But even so, in the midst of it, you’re just on your own. And you have a lot of pain. You have physical pain, your chest pain, just sadness, and all that. And often, so often, breakups, they trigger our old wounds.
(52:11): Ultimately, I think that’s what most of it’s about. I mean, yes, there’s the sadness and losing your best friend and just real things that are healthy loss or pain, but so often it triggers our attachment wounds and trauma that we had when we were younger, being abandoned, being left, and so I think that determines how much healing you have, how long it’s going to take you, and again, just witnessing every story and how you’re alone, you’re on your own, it takes a long time to heal.
(52:46): Sometimes it takes years to heal. I mean, sure, we all know people. I certainly do. I have a handful of friends that broke up 20 years ago, and they will never date again. And they may blame things on their ex or what they did, this or that. But really the truth is, the more damaged you are, the more pain and trauma from your childhood, the harder it is to heal, to rewire yourself.
(53:20): Ultimately, when I did the show on Salida too, so much of the response. I wasn’t sure I’m going to do a show on kind of neat-looking photos, but these stories that are very just sad, and I asked everyone, “Just write your pain. Don’t write about how you’re going to heal or how beautiful this was. Just write the pain, whether it’s three sentences or 300 words, that’s all I wanted.”
And I was a little concerned like, “Are people going to want to go to a show that’s just sort of dark and sort of sad and have a bunch of sad breakup stories?” I was a little nervous about that, and it was the first show I’ve ever done that was more about the human condition rather than trying to sell something pretty and make some money. But again, it was also a healing thing for me. It came out of my own experience.
(54:07): And it was, technically speaking, the photography was so fun to shoot because it was just neat subjects and these masks, and it was just really exciting creatively. But to put the stories with them really made it a really pretty deep, meaningful experience. And when I did the show at the Steamplant, it was amazing.
It was a nonstop stream of people, and people were spending two to three hours there, and they’d read one or two stories and they’d sit down. They came up to me. There was a lot of people crying, but there was a lot of people that were in the midst of a breakup, and they were in tears, but so glad they came. And a lot of the stories were like, “It’s just great to see that I’m not the only one in the world going through this. There’s a million people going through this. It’s going to be okay. This is just part of life.”
Adam Williams (54:53): People want to feel connected and want to feel seen and heard. When they read something like that and they see something like that, or they listen to a podcast where somebody’s talking about it, they’re feeling like, “I’m not alone.”
Tim Brown (55:05): Exactly. Because that’s what you do feel like when you’re in that space. For one thing, maybe socializing much. You’re just broken, and you’re hanging out at home. And day in and day out, you’re by yourself, and you’re in your head so much. You’re questioning everything. And you’re also trying to move forward and get out of it. And time heals to some extent.
But so often, people just bury that because time does make things go away. And unfortunately, if you don’t deal with it, it’s a really great opportunity for growth. I think relationships are one of the best vehicles for growth because you’re always… With someone else, you’re throwing up the mirror all the time, and it really is just going to challenge your ability to be compassionate and to have empathy and to learn to communicate well and all that.
Adam Williams (55:56): Could you see continuing this project for the reasons that you’re stating? It’s because it’s such a powerful point of connection and expression of the human condition and getting right at the heart of everything.
Tim Brown (56:09): Absolutely. And again, that’s why I think breakups are just an amazing opportunity to better your life. If you look at your pain, and don’t blame, just look at yourself and go, “Okay, what is the source of this?” And so often, you’ll find that the source is way beyond the abusive relationship you had or that person or whatever it was that created the demise of the relationship.
More than often it’s, “Oh, yeah. When I was three years old, my parents abandoned me, and I have huge anxiety and attachment wounds because I never got the love I wanted for my mom, and I’ve been looking for it ever since, but in the wrong ways. And so here I am.” I mean, that’s certainly what I did. You know what I mean?
Adam Williams (57:01): Those things sort of prove the story that, “Oh, I’m not good enough.” And this person finally figured it out too. Tim, this has been really great. We’re talking about photography. We’re talking about such deep stuff with the human condition, and I love that we’ve been able to combine it here today. Thanks for doing this with me.
Tim Brown (57:18): You’re welcome. It has been great. Thanks for the invite.
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Adam Williams (57:32): Thanks for listening to, We Are Chaffee’s Looking Upstream podcast. I hope that our conversation here today sparked curiosity for you. And if so, you can learn more in this episode’s show notes at wearchaffeepod.com.
If you have comments or know someone in Chaffee County, Colorado who I should consider talking with on the podcast, you can email me at adam@wearchaffeepod.com.
I also invite you to rate and review the podcast on Apple Podcasts or Spotify or whatever platform you use that has that functionality. I also welcome you’re telling others about the Looking Upstream podcast. Help us to keep growing community and connection through conversation.
(58:08): Once again, I’m Adam Williams, host, producer, and photographer. Jon Pray is engineer and producer. Thank you to KHEN 106.9 FM, our community radio partner in Salida, Colorado.
The Looking Upstream podcast is a collaboration with the Chaffee County Department of Public Health and the Chaffee Housing Authority, and it’s supported by the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment’s Office of Health Equity. You can learn more about the Looking Upstream podcast at wearchaffeepod.com and on Instagram at wearechaffeepod.
You also can learn more about the overall We Are Chaffee Storytelling initiative at wearchaffee.org. Till the next episode. As we say it, “We are Chaffee. Share stories. Make change.”
[Outro music, horns & guitar instrumental]
