Brouhaha, a Lower Haight studio owned by Fontaine Hernandez, makes tintypes using a photographic process introduced in 1853 — silver nitrate, a sheet of metal, a makeshift darkroom, and a 24-hour wait to see your face rendered in sepia on thin metal.

At the corner of Haight and Fillmore Streets, a sign in the window announces the studio's name — which, Fontaine Hernandez will tell you, is not a statement of intent so much as an accident of taste. She just liked the sound of it. Mission Local's Zoe Malen reported that people on the sidewalk mispronounce it constantly, and Hernandez jokes that it's "not a word that can be said in a normal way."

The space earns the name anyway. Floral wallpaper draped with pepper ghosts. Dollhouse structures with moving figures. Portraits of babies made using the Victorian "hidden mother" technique — in which a parent, shrouded in fabric to prevent blur, holds the infant still for the long exposure. It's a cabinet of photographic curiosities before you reach the back room, where a large-format Calumet camera and chemical trays mark an active darkroom.

What Hernandez does there is make tintypes — a photographic process introduced in 1853 that found its widest use during the Civil War, when soldiers sent portraits home to their families. The technique had nearly disappeared before a recent revival as a fine-art form. A sheet of thin metal (the same material used for trophy plaques) is bathed in silver nitrate and loaded into the camera. Subject sits. Shutter opens. Then the plate travels to a makeshift darkroom — red lights, a blackout curtain she's stitched to look like a vintage circus tent, an old suitcase as the chemical tray base — where Hernandez develops and fixes the image. What emerges is an underexposed negative: freckles read dark, eyes go pale. Dried and varnished against oxidizing and scratches, it's handed to the subject the next day on a thin piece of metal.

Hernandez is unembarrassed about the imprecision the process demands. "Tintype is going to do whatever it wants to do," she told Mission Local. "I'm not trying to be a chemist, it's hard enough to do tintype." The variability is part of the appeal — no two plates are identical, and the subject's involvement in watching the image develop is part of what she calls the "magic." That philosophy extends to her attitude about gatekeeping in photography. She describes the culture as often secretive and competitive, and she pushes back: "It's almost like someone asking what type of paintbrush Rembrandt uses and him saying 'I can't tell you, that's a secret.' It's like… no one is going to paint like you buddy."

Interest in tactile, analog photography — Polaroid, film, large-format — has grown sharply in recent years, and Hernandez told Mission Local she sees tintype as part of that same current. Whether the corner of Haight and Fillmore can sustain a studio offering a process that takes 24 hours to deliver a single portrait on metal is its own kind of experiment. Walking by tomorrow, you'd see the name Brouhaha in the window and hear, probably, someone on the sidewalk trying to say it wrong.

This piece builds on reporting by Zoe Malen for Mission Local.