Tintype rebirth
Pfister artist processes love of history through 19th-century-era photography
Taylor Davis, a valet and bellman at the Pfister Hotel, sits down in front of the camera, and Margaret Muza goes to work.
Wearing goggles, gloves and a mask, Muza mixes a liquid film called collodion in a nearby walk-in closet that she's converted to a darkroom. She carefully pours just enough collodion to coat a metal plate — aluminum with a black coating. She drips off the excess and then puts the plate into a bath of silver nitrate. When her sand timer runs out, Muza loads the plate to transport it from her darkroom to the camera. She lines up the shot and clicks the shutter.
Muza must develop the photograph in the next 15 minutes before the chemicals on the metal plate dry.
The process is a step back in time. Her photos don't upload to the cloud. There's no digital screen. She doesn't use film.
Muza, the artist in residence at Milwaukee's Pfister Hotel, practices a style of photography popular during the American Civil War, capturing images onto sheets of metal.
It's called tintype photography, characterized by its use of metal to create a direct positive. The style — also known as melainotype or ferrotype — became popular in the mid-1850s. It was more durable and cheaper than daguerreotypes or ambrotype photographs at the time. The tintype method went out of common use at the beginning of the 20th century.
Back in her darkroom under safe red lights, Muza pours developer onto the metal. Slowly, a negative of the image appears. Once she sees what she's looking for, she pours on water to stop the development and rinses the chemicals off. Then she pours fixer onto the plate to turn the negative image into a positive one.
Tintypes can last for more than 100 years if they're preserved. To protect her photographs, Muza pours a varnish made from alcohol, lavender oil and tree sap onto the plate. The tintype is complete.
The portrait of Davis in his uniform could have been displayed on opening day at the Pfister in 1893 — and it would have looked charmingly old then.
Finding a teacher
Muza grew up in Bay View. After graduating from Oak Creek High School in 2005, she moved to New York, worked as a live-in nanny and tried to become an actress.
Homesick after five months, she returned to Milwaukee. She worked as a nanny and filleted fish for Sweet Water, but didn't call herself an artist until she picked up her tintype camera.
Muza's love for history led her to tintypes.
She collected old photographs and wondered what about the process made them look so different than a picture she could take with her iPhone.
She most loved the images of soldiers from the Civil War and portraits of President Abraham Lincoln. Most of those photos were taken as tintypes.
Researching tintypes on the Internet she stumbled into a Mother Earth News article, "Tin Type: The 19th Century Business You Can Start Today." She bookmarked the page and forgot about it.
A few months later, she saw a tintype of newscaster Katie Couric.
"I could see her freckles and wrinkles and she looked so different," Muza said. "She was beautiful but it wasn’t how I was used to seeing her. And so I knew it was something different. That's what a tintype does. I could see how it changed people."
Muza found the bookmarked link and contacted the author asking him to be her tintype teacher.
A week later he replied. The article was decades old and he doesn't take tintype photos anymore.
The 1975 article had been published online as part of Mother Earth News' digital archive.
Muza kept searching for a teacher and found a studio in Brooklyn holding a two-day workshop on the process. She flew to New York with a friend and learned the basics of tintypes at Pioneer Works .
Once back in Milwaukee, Muza searched online for a camera and drove to Illinois to purchase one that could take 4-by-5 inch tintypes for $150.
She bought the chemicals she needed online and started to practice. It took weeks before she got the process down.
Muza remembered chills going down her spine seeing her first successful tintype.
It was winter in Milwaukee. Muza was practicing in a friend's dark basement.
She wasn't interested in standing outside in the cold trying to take a picture. Without windows, Muza couldn't seem to light the space enough for the camera to capture an image.
"We were just adding more light and more light and more light," she said. "Nothing would work." The tintype process needs more light than others.
Frustrated, Muza finally went outside. With the sun reflecting off the snow, she finally had enough light to take a picture of her boyfriend at the time standing against the house.
Like she had with other practice shots, Muza poured on the developer and then stopped it with water.
"I thought I had seen a ghost," she said. The magic of watching tintypes develop never gets old, she said.
She's improved over the past few years.
After she offered cheap portraits to friends to cover the cost of materials, Muza's business picked up.
Strangers would see posts of the portraits on Instagram and ask if Muza (@margaretmuza) would take their picture.
Her stint as artist in residence at the Pfister is the first time she'll devote the majority of her time to this art.
Muza, who turned 30 the same weekend she moved into the studio space at the hotel, plans to photograph the historic hotel during the next year. She's already picked out a few spots, like a room in the Pfister's basement where silver is polished and stored.
Visitors to the hotel can watch her at work, and she will take on customers as her schedule permits.