The Tin Gypsy is a traveling photographic darkroom and laboratory built out of a 1961 vintage travel trailer. Photographer Meghann Gilligan rehabilitated the trailer and retrofitted the Gypsy as a mobile darkroom, specially designed for the practice of antique photographic techniques,focusing on the making of tintypes using the wet plate collodion process (c. 1850). This project takes its inspiration from the historical origins of photography and it’s earliest practitioners, who were equal parts mad scientist, adventurer and artist. These early photographers built darkrooms onto horse-drawn buggies and traveled the country,taking the wet plate process out of the studio and into the field and making tintype photographs of the folks in the small towns and cities they traveled through along the way. The goal of the Tin Gypsy Project is to reinvent the traveling tintype photo laboratory for a new era. We will travel near and far with the Gypsy, using antique, hand-made photographic techniques to create images of the interesting people, places and things we find along the way.