Scott Hilton

When he was in the 11th grade, Scott Hilton attended his first yearbook staff meeting. His teacher asked who would like to be a photographer, and Hilton raised his hand to volunteer, a decision that led him to dedicate countless hours to capturing moments and developing film photographs in the school’s dark room.

What started as a high school extracurricular activity for Hilton blossomed into a passion for photography that has continued for decades. A pivotal moment in his journey as a photographer was the introduction of digital photography. As everyone around him began to look toward a digital future, Hilton grew more and more curious about what came before the analog photography he knew so well.

“My long-standing interest in history blended with the shift in technology, and I started incorporating history into my work,” he says. “I became very interested in the historical processes and how people did handmade photography before film existed.”

Hilton now works in tintype photography, a handmade photography method that was established in the late 1850s. Tintype involves applying a thin layer of chemicals to a piece of aluminum, exposing the aluminum to the light in a camera, and then processing it with additional chemicals, which results in the photo appearing on the aluminum.

Perhaps most emblematic of Hilton’s interest in history—and in playing with its pieces and recontextualizing them—is Project Barbatype. For this project, Hilton and photographer Bryan Wing took tintype portraits of contestants in beard and mustache competitions. The contestants often created characters for themselves, dressing in costumes to match the aesthetic of their facial hair. Hilton and his partner brought a portable darkroom to bars where these competitions were held and scheduled sessions with competitors before or after they walked onto the stage to be judged.

“Photography is a miracle. It’s taking a mixture of physics, optics, chemistry, vision, and light and melding all those things together so that you have an image that is an illusion of reality,” Hilton says. “On some level, I am flabbergasted that it works at all, and I am continually rejuvenated by it. I’ve been doing this for more than 40 years, and I still get the same thrill out of it every single time.”