Lara Porzak’s first monograph makes memory a physical object

By Olivia Hart

Los Angeles-based fine-art photographer Lara Porzak has gathered more than 140 photographs into The Chemistry of Memory, her first monograph: a 240-page hardcover from DAMIANI Books.

Porzak has used analog techniques for more than three decades, working exclusively with tintypes and gelatin silver prints. She often develops images on site in a mobile darkroom, producing handcrafted photographs through a slow, hands-on process that makes each image a physical artifact.

Her first book gives that practice a sustained form. The volume’s open-sewn binding and physical presentation reinforce its central proposition: a photograph can preserve an experience and still remain a material object, carrying traces of time through its making.

What does “time travel” look like on paper?

The subjects of The Chemistry of Memory range across pastoral scenes and still lifes, with landscapes, animals, plants, celestial forms and moments of human presence. Porzak’s longstanding engagement with the natural world supplies the imagery; the book’s larger argument concerns what remains after an encounter with light.

In the introduction, Porzak writes that “Most photographers contemplate the past, it’s inherent in our work.”

She continues: “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.”

It is a neat formulation, and a slightly grand one. Yet the material approach of the 240-page volume makes the claim less decorative than it first sounds. The volume presents the photographs as handcrafted prints, keeping each image attached to the processes that produced it.

Why make the book itself an artifact?

An open-sewn hardcover can slow reading by making the handling of pages part of the encounter. Here, that physicality matches Porzak’s mobile darkroom method: the image and the apparatus used to make it belong to the same material logic. Neither is treated as disposable.

As the publisher, DAMIANI Books has given a three-decade practice its first unified monograph, bringing more than 140 images into a single 240-page object. The book is available for purchase. It also turns a working method into a sequence that can be read at book scale.

The more than 140 photographs include many appearing for the first time. On a conservative three-decade frame, that selected group works out to roughly five photographs a year, although a monograph is not a year-by-year ledger. The calculation is not a productivity score, but a reminder of how many discrete encounters the book compresses into one sequence.

That sequence is wide but coherent. Pastoral scenes and still lifes sit alongside animals, plants, celestial forms and traces of human presence. Together, they ask how an image can hold both an observed world and a sense of time passing.

What does the first monograph make visible?

Presented as both images and physical objects, the photographs engage one of photography’s central concerns: the difference between a picture that circulates and a handcrafted object made through a slow process. Porzak’s exclusive use of tintypes and gelatin silver printing gives that distinction particular force.

The title is literal first: film, chemistry and print. It becomes a metaphor for how images retain the present by turning it into the past. Porzak’s more than 140 pictures make that proposition through accumulation rather than narration.

Nor does the volume claim that stopping time is literal. Its handmade objects argue something quieter: time does not disappear into a seamless image; it settles into surface, sequence and the conditions of looking.

The closest verdict belongs to the objects rather than the thesis. A handcrafted photograph has a surface; the book gives it binding and sequence. In The Chemistry of Memory, that physical stubbornness gives the familiar idea of preserving the past a sharper edge.

With more than 140 images, many previously unpublished, this first monograph gives Porzak’s analog practice a public platform. Its direction is towards wider attention for photographs made to hold time in material form.