Working Stiffs: Occupational Portraits in the Age of Tintypes
by Michael L. Carlebach
Category: History

Working Stiffs explores the historical significance of the tintype, a cheap, fast, easy-to-make, practically indestructible type of photograph that became enormously popular among the working class in the late nineteenth century. This collection exhibits more than eighty examples of a specific kind of tintype: occupational portraits, photographs of working people with the tools of their trade. In a detailed historical examination, Michael L. Carlebach finds that these often-dismissed photographs reveal a great deal about late nineteenth-century values.