Tintype Photographer Uses Mobile Darkroom to Create Handcrafted Images of Memory and Time

Photographer Lara Porzak, who has spent more than three decades using analog techniques to create photographs that function as both images and physical artifacts, has published her first book.

Los Angeles-based fine-art photographer Porzak has brought over 140 of her photographs together in her first monograph The Chemistry of Memory (published by DAMIANI Books).

Porzak works exclusively with analog techniques, including tintypes and gelatin silver printing, using a slow, hands-on process to produce her photographs. She often develops images on site in a mobile darkroom, creating handcrafted prints that explore the relationship between photography, memory, and time.

‘All Photographers are Time Travelers’

In The Chemistry of Memory, Porzak’s photographs span pastoral scenes and still lifes, reflecting her longstanding engagement with the natural world. The images move between landscapes, animals, plants, celestial forms, and moments of human presence. Together, they examine how photographs can preserve experiences and carry a sense of presence across time.

“Most photographers contemplate the past, it’s inherent in our work,” Porzak writes in the book’s introduction. “The moment I place my tripod or raise my camera to my eye, I know that I can stop time. The present will become the past at the exact moment light strikes my film. I suppose you can say all photographers are time travelers.”

The 240-page hardcover book features open-sewn binding and more than 140 photographs, many of which have not been published before. Bringing the work together in a single volume, The Chemistry of Memory presents Porzak’s photographs as both images and physical objects, reflecting on the passage of time and what remains through the act of photographing.

Lara Porzak’s The Chemistry of Memory is published by DAMIANI Books. It can be purchased here.