Victorian photographs of the abandoned Dreamland amusement park in Margate, Kent

The project isn’t exclusively made up of tintypes. Dreamland the book includes colour, digital pictures documenting the park’s crumbling interiors, and studio shots of curious objects that Ball found amid the rubble, against bright backgrounds.

“The site’s been empty for nearly 10 years so people have been in there nicking lead from the roof, smashing stuff up, moving things around. Every time I’d go I’d just pick up little bits – like snooker balls and old tickets,” he explains. “I didn’t want to do just a book of the tintypes; I wanted to reflect different aspects of an amusement park.”

But tintype photography has a special relevance. “People talk about the rebirth of Margate but Dreamland isn’t being levelled and something new being built – it’s being restored,” he says. Both restoration and tintype photography are physical work, which tie into the man-made aspects of a seaside experience, says Ball.

“You can see my fingerprints on the corners of them, you can see the scratches where they’ve come into contact with something when they’ve been transported or where I’ve poured the chemicals in a certain way. The notion of repair is really important – it’s something that’s been slowly put back together. You can still see the cracks, and I like that.”

Dreamland is the first step in a wider exploration of the “architecture of amusement” – a project that is taking Ball beyond Kent. In April he went to New York to photograph Coney Island in Brooklyn, and he’s planning a trip to Atlantic City in New Jersey. The fact that he owns old tintypes made in each of these three places gives the series a material connection with the past.

“I could have shot it all on glass negative and made prints in the darkroom but I decided not to,” he says. “The sheet of tin you see on the wall in The Photographers’ Gallery is exactly the same sheet that was in the back of the camera in Dreamland the day the picture was taken. There is a physical trace all the way from start to the finish.”

Rob Ball: Dreamlands runs from 16 June to 02 August 2015 at The Photographers’ Gallery Print Sales Gallery, London. To accompany the exhibition, Ball will be holding a tintype portrait day in a teepee outside the galleryon 04 July, from 10am-5pm.

Dreamlands is published by Dewi Lewis.

Stay up to date with stories such as this, delivered to your inbox every Friday.

Rachel Segal Hamilton

Rachel Segal Hamilton is a freelance writer and editor, specialising in photography and visual culture, for art magazines, book publishers, national press, awards, agencies and brands. Since 2018, she’s been contributing editor for the Royal Photographic Society Journal, is a regular writer for Aesthetica and author of Unseen London, published by Hoxton Mini Press.