Working Stiffs: Occupational Portraits in the Age of Tintypes

The tintype, patented in 1856, was a cheap, fast, easy-to-make, practically indestructible type of photograph that became enormously popular among the working class in the late nineteenth century. For common laborers and their families, the opportunity to join the ranks of those who owned pictures of family and friends—the upper classes—was momentous. This collection exhibits more than eighty examples of a specific kind of tintype: occupational portraits, photographs of working people with th…