When the American fine art photographer Lara Porzak’s mother survived a massive stroke, her memory was badly affected.
As anyone with a relative who suffers memory problems will know, it helps enormously if they can be surrounded by familiar things. So Porzak did what came naturally.
As she recounts in her new book, The Chemistry of Memory: “I taped pictures of our loved ones to the walls surrounding her bed to reintroduce her to their faces, so she could remember her own identity."
She also included pictures of places they'd visited together, “so she could remember her footprint in the surrounding world”.
The good news is that things improved from there. In the decade since, her mother has re-learned how to hold a pen and a fork, and how to walk again. She now needs round-the-clock care, and lives with Porzak.
And this experience runs through the book, which brings together Porzak’s photographs from 1993 to 2025: horses, owls, butterflies, flowers and wide American landscapes, many of them made as one-of-a-kind tintypes.
Old-school techniques
Porzak is known for using labour-intensive, non-digital photographic methods, often utilizing vintage cameras and lenses from the late 1800s to create her photographs. While most photographers keep their darkroom chemicals well away from everyday life, she very much doesn’t.
Bottles of silver nitrate, ferrous sulfate and ethyl ether stand around the sink where she brushes her teeth. Rolls of black and white film sit in the fridge next to the cheese and vegetables. And her mother’s hospital bed is in the corner of her photography studio.
But that's not a failure of organisation, but a lifestyle choice. “I don’t separate my life of making photographs from my quotidian existence, they are one and the same,” she writes.
And that brings us to the all-important link between photography and memory. “The present will become the past at the exact moment light strikes my film," she reflects.
"I suppose you can say all photographers are time travellers. I think of my photographs as monuments to moments that were: the capturing of light, time and feeling. That’s the chemistry of memory."
An unpredictable process
Porzak is known for using labour-intensive, non-digital photographic methods, often utilizing vintage cameras and lenses from the late 1800s to create her photographs. While most photographers keep their darkroom chemicals well away from everyday life, she very much doesn’t.
Many of the images in the book are tintypes, made with the 19th-century wet plate collodion process. The process is unpredictable, and she welcomes that. Swirls, drips and stains creep in around the edges of her plates, giving each image the feel of an old, half-remembered scene.
You can see it in an owl that stares out of a mottled green and amber plate; in a butterfly that seems to flutter in a double exposure. In another image, a single tulip has drooped out of its bottle and lies on the table, leaves arching overhead.
Other pictures were shot on film and printed in warm sepia tones: dramatic dunes at sunrise, a portrait of a horse called REMington.
Porzak writes in the introduction: “I want to remember what it feels like to fall into a piece of time when chance and circumstance create a new vision for me to preserve.” She calls the book “a remembrance of a life” and hopes readers will connect with it. “Perhaps they will become your memory, too,” she writes.
The Chemistry of Memory by Lara Porzak is published by Damiani and costs £65 / $85 / €75.
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