This East Austin Studio Is Keeping a 170-Year-Old Photography Process Alive

Tucked behind Justine’s Brasserie in East Austin, just beyond the red drapes and iron cafe tables, a small wooden trailer glows in the courtyard like a holdover from another century. Inside, British photographer Adrian Whipp makes striking tintype portraits the same way they were created more than 170 years ago.

As the lights come up, the room grows quiet and even the most camera-fluent subject sits up a little straighter as comforts of modern photography fall away. After the flash, Whipp disappears into the small darkroom in the back of the studio. Minutes later, a face emerges in a tray of developer, rendered in luminous silver. There are no screens to review, no filters to adjust. “There’s not even a negative. I can’t reproduce that plate,” Whipp said. The portrait exists exactly once.

Whipp founded Lumiere Tintype in 2013 in Austin, after training in analog photography in England just as the industry was shifting to digital. Drawn to photography’s earliest methods, he taught himself the wet-plate collodion process from an old manual and years of experimentation. He opened, by his own account, at “probably the worst possible time” to start a portrait studio.

Analog appeal

Despite the shift to digital photography, Austin has embraced his handmade process. Reservations routinely book three to four months in advance, prompting Whipp to hire his first employee in 13 years, Matthew Fossier. If demand continues to climb, a second location may be on the horizon.

Part of the appeal, he believes, is that the process feels increasingly rare. At a time when images can be endlessly edited — or generated entirely by artificial intelligence — a tintype is singular. It carries the imperfections of the moment and the unmistakable mark of the person who made it.

“With AI, you can prompt it to do anything you want,” Whipp said. “That makes the analog, handmade process shine a little bit more, because there’s a human element, and there’s an element of unpredictability and of chance.” For him, the loss is also one of permanence. “We have an infinity of photographs. We can take as many as we want, but we rarely print them, rarely cherish them. They’re not in wallets, not in shoeboxes or not in albums anymore.”

The studio itself feels like an extension of that philosophy. Modeled after the itinerant photographers who once traveled town to town with portable darkrooms, Lumiere Tintype has found a perfect home in the courtyard of Justine’s, where musicians, artists and longtime Austinites drift in after dinner or before a show. Lana Del Rey has sat for portraits more than once, sometimes alongside fellow musician Nikki Lane, but most evenings the trailer fills with couples, families and friends marking ordinary milestones that become extraordinary once they’re fixed in silver.

A singular process

Whipp encourages people to come as their most authentic selves — or their most outrageous ones. Some arrive carrying pieces of their heritage and identity: heirloom jewelry passed down through generations, historical or ancestral dress, objects heavy with family meaning. Others go fully whimsical — snakes carried in pillowcases, a blacksmith’s tomahawks, oversized papier-mâché pigeon heads or standing in front of the handmade wooden moon Whipp built for Valentine’s Day portraits. And plenty arrive ready to shed everything: nudity has been part of the studio since its earliest nights. “There are no rules,” Whipp said.

Most subjects settle into the same solemn expression that defined 19th-century portraiture. “We smile in pictures now. That’s just what we do,” Whipp said, which is exactly what makes holding a still, stoic gaze feel almost radical today. Without the promise of hundreds of takes or an instant preview, people sink into stillness, and the portrait becomes less about performing for the camera than being present for it. Whipp and Fossier protect that stillness on purpose. “It’s real. That’s what you look like,” Fossier says. “It becomes this honest collaboration very quickly. It has to.”

It’s what keeps people coming back, too. “I’ve had folks who came in on a first date, and then we did the engagement picture, then the wedding, then the bump shot, then the baby,” Whipp reflected, saying that his repeat customers capture some of his favorite photos.

In a city defined by constant change, Lumiere Tintype offers something increasingly rare: a reason to slow down. For a few quiet minutes, phones disappear, conversation fades and a handmade portrait captures not an idealized version of a person, but exactly who they were in that moment.

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