LARA PORZAK HAS JUST RETURNED from 10 days in the woods. The fine art photographer traveled from her home near Venice Beach to New Mexico, then to Colorado and, finally, all the way to New Hampshire making tintypes. “I’ll follow anybody anywhere if they’re doing tintypes,” she says, referring to a 19th-century photography style where chemicals produce an image on metal. Says Laura, “It’s one of the messiest things you can do.”

No matter the physical labor or volatile chemicals involved, Lara commits herself to the particular photographic aesthetic you cannot preview on the back of a digital camera. Using old techniques—from the Leonardo pinhole camera to the century-old daguerreotype to the 1960s Diana—she captures raw emotions, even spiritual sensibilities in grainy shades of gray.