Milwaukee’s Pfister Hotel sponsors a unique residency program for area artists. For 12 months, the selected artist sets up shop in a space off the lobby by the elevators on the first floor. They spend a minimum of 30 hours per week in the Pfister studio, making their art in full view of the public and interacting with visitors. Reggie Baylor was the first artist in residence in 2009, and since then there have been painters, sculptors, and fabric artists.
This year it’s photographerMargaret Muza. But don’t look for a DSLR or even a Polaroid point-and-shoot. Muza works with glass plates and an early photographic technique called tintype. Muza says it was a method that was used from about 1860 into the 1870's.
"It documented all the Civil War and part of the Wild West. It was the wet-plate process that came before film was even invented," she says.
Muza says one of the challenges of working with the tintype process is the time it takes to set up a shot - sometimes more than an hour - contrasted with the speed with which she has to make the print once she takes the picture, thanks to the chemical developing process that tintype requires.
"It's a little different than film," she explains. "It's not as though I could take the tintype and develop it the next day or a week later. I have actually about 10 minutes when I have to develop it."
The artist took a weekend workshop a few years ago to learn the basics of the this 19th century technique. But since then she has been mostly self taught thanks to a 21st century technology: YouTube.
"Because of the Internet, it's made it so much easier to make a photograph from this old time," she says. "Even ordering all my chemistry is extremely simple. If it wasn't for the Internet I probably wouldn't be doing this at all."
Muza is in residence at the Pfister through March 31st, 2018.
