[Hyphen]-Americans: Tintype Portraits

[Hyphen] Americans is a series of tintype portraits made with chemistry mixed according to nineteenth-century recipes, period brass lenses and wooden view cameras. Composed of thousands of portraits, the project is a broadly diverse collection of American faces. Each individual in the project–identified only by a first name–defiantly asserts his or her self-hood, resisting any imposed or external categorizing system we might bring to these images. At once contemporary and timeless, these portraits raise questions about our place as individuals in history, and the role that photographic technologies and the history of photography have played in defining identity.