Want to see your 1800s self? Lower Haight tintype studio can make it happen.

Walk into Fontaine Hernandez’s studio at Fillmore and Haight streets, and you might think you’d been transported to another world.

An eerie, interactive museum of oddities contrasts the stark white room in the back.

The space — named Brouhaha for no reason other than that the owner liked the sound — features floral wallpaper lined with Pepper’s ghosts, winding dollhouse structures with moving figures, and portraits of babies using the “hidden mother” photography technique used by Victorians. 

The studio also creates tintypes, a photographic technique invented in the 1850s that was used by Civil War soldiers to send images home to their families.

It’s an antique process, and Hernandez — herself an eccentric figure with two-tone blond-and-brown hair — promotes the old-timey feel with a website that features ragtime music and a gentleman in a bowler. 

With a recent rise in interest for more physical and retro photography techniques, like Polaroid and film cameras, she is hopeful that tintype has a future. 

She values that the process has a way of involving the subjects into what she calls the “magic” of tintype. This way of collaboration opposes what she describes as a competitive and “gatekeepy” culture of art and photography. 

“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,” she laughs.

In her studio, Hernandez takes a sheet of metal — the same material used for trophy plaques — that’s been bathed in silver nitrate, loads it into a large-format camera, and photographs her subject. 

Next, she takes the plate to a makeshift darkroom, a cobbled-together space with red lights and a blackout curtain covering an old suitcase as the base, where she develops it and pours a chemical fixer over the image. The product that emerges is an underexposed negative image: freckles darken, eyes lighten in color. 

The plate then gets dried and varnished to prevent oxidizing and scratches before Hernandez turns it over to the subject the next day. 

The process is inexact, as much art as science.

“Tintype is going to do whatever it wants to do,” says Hernandez, explaining that results differ frequently. “I’m not trying to be a chemist. It’s hard enough to do tintype.”

Customers seem in awe when they see their likeness on a thin metal sheet, Hernandez says.

She tells them, “That’s just [the] 1800s you.”