Artist Sara Mulvey utilizes historic 19th-century photographic processes to create medium, large, and ultra-large format images printed on metal or glass. The expressive portraits, lovely figurative works, expansive landscapes, and intriguing still lifes are developed in Mulvey’s River Arts District studio or in “Big Blue”— a mobile darkroom (resembling a food truck) that can be booked by clients for house calls. One of Mulvey’s works was recently exhibited at New York’s Soho Photo Gallery, which has showcased works by highly influential artists such as Ansel Adams, Minor White, and Edward Steichen.
How did you get into photography?
My granny gave me a cigar box of tintype photos and I was enamored by them. I had never picked up a camera before, but I become obsessed with wanting to know, “How do I do this?”
So how do you do it?
It’s called wet plate because a colloidal suspension is poured on the plate’s surface and then you put the plate in a silver-nitrate solution that makes it sensitive to light. While it’s still wet you expose it to light and then develop it in a dark room. At first it’s milky white, and when the image appears it’s like this hit of dopamine this magical moment and instant gratitude watching it come to life.
What creates that mysteriously alluring vintage quality?
There is this timelessness you can’t put your finger on — someone called it the dustbowl effect. Part of it is the detail and high resolution. But what you can’t see is that they are also very tactile, because the photographs themselves are heavy. They are meant to be held. When you hold them you can see and feel that that they’re handmade.
When did you start doing tintype?
About 6 years ago. My very first camera was a Kodak brownie box that my mentor John Coffer helped to modify to shoot tintypes. Then I got a large-format camera from the 1800s, and during 2020 I decided I was going to take one wet-plate photograph per day, to find out if this was really something I loved and wanted to do. I shot for 365 days in a row. Right before the vaccines came out, I got COVID and was sick for a month and a half. But I just kept doing it, even while in a fever-dream state, and didn’t miss a single day.
That’s inspired persistence.
It was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done, and I made some pretty unimpressive work that year — but it was a beautiful practice. Who knows whether I would have stuck with it, had I not had that time to do it.
Time is essential to the process, right?
These days we’re used to shooting 100 pictures a minute, but I can’t take the photo with just a snap. I have to slow down — and the client has to slow down — which helps create so many deeper connections with people.
Sara Mulvey, 1 Roberts St. Studio 101 in the River Arts District, Asheville. To book a session, see saramulvey.com or e-mail info@saramulvey.com. (Also on Instagram @thesilversunbeam)