This ongoing project began in the summer of 2025 at Greeley Hat Works in Greeley, Colorado. Established in 1909, the shop has spent more than a century crafting custom cowboy hats by hand for ranchers, rodeo and musical performers, and working people across the West — among them President George W. Bush and cast and crew of the television series Yellowstone.

Over the course of the project I have made more than 200 tintype photographs there. The work extends my long-standing interest in the materials and traditions that shape identity and memory in the American West.

I was drawn to the parallels between hat making and tintype photography, both trades that emerged in the nineteenth century as symbols of craft and image-making in the American West. The earliest hatters and photographers shared a dangerous intimacy with their materials, working with mercury, collodion, and silver nitrate in the pursuit of beauty and precision. Each trade produced an artifact that captured identity and character: the hat became a signature of the individual, and the tintype a lasting impression of that identity.

At Greeley Hat Works, I photographed the process of steaming, shaping, and branding felt hats and made portraits of the makers who carry that history forward. The shop employs more than thirty craftspeople who continue this handmade tradition. Each customer is measured with a conformateur, a nineteenth-century French device that records the exact contours of the head. The hats are made from beaver felt, shaped and sanded by hand, then finished with a hand-stamped leather band inside the crown. 

These tintypes speak to endurance and authenticity, capturing the intersection of labor and tradition that continues to define the visual language of the West. The images shown here are only a small sample of the larger body of work created during this project. Each portrait, like a tintype or a hat, records not only a likeness but a labor of care and permanence.