Bettina Speckner (born spring of 1962 in Offenburg, Germany) is a jewelry designer, widely known for her use of photography in brooch assemblages, using nineteenth century ferrotype (tintype) portraits as one may use raw materials for jewelry.
Today, she creates her own tintypes with a handmade camera obscura and a portable makeshift darkroom. Tintypes are one-shot images created from a layer of emulsion applied to a thin sheet of metal; each image is taken and developed in the same location. Her photo on metal is not limited to the tintype method, she uses many techniques including photo etching on zinc and photo-enameling. Bettina does not do the enameling process herself but works with a small company in Portugal that still practices this process.
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