Jenny Sampson is a Berkeley-based American photographer known for her commitment to wet plate collodion and traditional black-and-white photography. A third-generation Californian, she grew up amid the surf, skate, and countercultural movements that continue to inform her understanding of community and place. She studied psychobiology at Pitzer College in Southern California, graduating with a BA in 1991. That scientific background contributes an analytical yet empathetic approach to the people she photographs. Living and working in Berkeley, she has remained closely connected to the Bay Area’s artistic and photographic communities.

Sampson’s visual language brings a nineteenth-century process into conversation with contemporary subjects. As a tintypist, she makes wet plate photographs on metal plates, carrying out a slow, demanding procedure that produces singular images with dense tonal range and visible material irregularities. Long exposures require sitters to remain still, creating a concentrated, collaborative encounter between photographer and subject. Rather than emphasizing the speed and spectacle often associated with sports photography, Sampson gives her portraits stillness, dignity, and permanence. Her parallel practice in traditional black-and-white film reinforces this attention to craft and places her within the broader revival of historic photographic techniques.

Her best-known body of work is an ongoing series of tintype portraits of skateboarders, especially women and girls. The project led to the photobook Skater Girls, whose large-format ambrotype and tintype portraits challenge the predominantly male visual history of skateboarding. The wet plate process transforms skaters from fleeting figures of action into monumental, fully present subjects. Sampson also made Skaters: Tintype Portraits of West Coast Skateboarders, extending the project to a broader range of California’s skate community. Her work has appeared in Metal Magazine, All About Photo, and The Photographer’s Eye collective, and she was a featured artist in a Berkeley Art Center residency in early 2019.

Sampson’s career combines artistic practice with community involvement. She belongs to Rolls, a San Francisco-based women’s photography collective that supports and promotes female photographers. Her work has appeared in group and solo exhibitions, and she has spoken with Girl Is NOT A 4 Letter Word in 2019 and the podcast All Through a Lens in 2021, discussing subjects including disposable cameras and the permanence of analog photography. These platforms reflect her position between subcultural documentation and fine-art practice. Although she has not achieved broad institutional fame, she has earned recognition among skate photographers, analog enthusiasts, and practitioners of historic processes.

For photobook collectors, Sampson’s editions offer a compelling meeting of subject and method. Skater Girls presents sequenced portraits whose formal pacing and handmade character echo the singular nature of tintype plates. The scarcity of her photographs and books is grounded less in market hype than in the limitations of a process that produces unique plates or small print runs. Collectors interested in contemporary uses of nineteenth-century techniques, women’s skate culture, or West Coast documentary photography will find her work a distinctive entry point. Her focused attention to community, craft, and the physical life of the image gives these books lasting relevance within contemporary analog photography.

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