Vagabond Archives

Preserving Memory Through Tintype

Vagabond Archives is a traveling tintype portrait studio and living archive documenting culture, identity, migration, and belonging through the historic wet plate collodion process.

Created by Nigerian artist and tintype photographer Oluwatosin Popoola, the project travels between cities to create museum-quality tintype portraits while collecting the stories that accompany them. Participants are invited to wear traditional clothing or bring meaningful objects that speak to their history, allowing each portrait to become both an image and a record of memory.

Working with the nineteenth-century wet plate collodion process, every tintype is handmade, one of one, and designed to endure for generations. These archival portraits become heirlooms that resist the impermanence of today’s digital images.

Whether photographed in Los Angeles, New York, Cleveland, or future cities across the African diaspora, every portrait contributes to an expanding visual archive exploring heritage, family, migration, and home.