Featured Photographer: Laura Barth’s Emulsion Lift Alchemy
“Last Hike at Falls Lake”
To be a woman and a mother in the twenty-first century is to exist in a state of continuous recentering: a quiet, internalized balancing act that rarely pauses and never fully resolves. Each day brings a new set of shifting expectations: nurturing children, maintaining a partnership, tending to friendships, building a career, managing a household, and somehow ensuring that none of these spheres violently collide. The work is endless, and, at times, mind-numbing. In 2019, as the pandemic swept away the remaining boundaries between work, home, and self, this careful calibration became nearly impossible. For lens-based artist and scientist Laura Barth, the pressure to maintain composure and the illusion of neatly compartmentalized roles became a silent, brutal weight, one that pressed inward as the future grew ever more uncertain.
It is in the attempt to lift this weight that Barth’s work finds its urgency, its necessity, and its rare alchemical spark. “Mythos and Manna,” the artist’s foundational series, is rooted in a period of profound upheaval and growth. Created during the aftermath of divorce, the birth of her daughter, and the pursuit of a graduate degree, the work explores how formative experiences and archetypal stories become woven into personal mythology. By reprinting digital memories from old cell phones with the Polaroid Lab and lifting and manipulating their emulsions onto watercolor paper, often combining them with found objects and natural foliage, Barth transforms fragile Polaroid surfaces, reshaping her fractured experiences into images of cohesive, mythic resonance.
“I found myself suspended between two lives—the one I had left behind, and the one I was still learning to inhabit.”
“Falls Lake”
“A lot of the pictures from that series were self portraits or old modeling proofs from gigs I took when I was a broke student working on a PhD that I eventually quit,” Barth recalls. After printing each photo with the Polaroid Lab, the imagery is layered with botanical samples and hand-drawn interventions, marking each piece as both artifact and talisman. Barth often found herself returning to places imbued with memory: a last hike near home with the dogs before a life-changing move, the specific wildflowers from a new home, moments shared with her daughter. Through the unpredictable process of emulsion lifts, these memories are not merely preserved but transformed, sometimes softened, sometimes made stranger, their emotional resonance shifting with each touch of the emulsion. The result is work that is both deeply personal and universally legible, art that documents not just what appears on the page, but also the profound, ongoing process of self-integration, an alchemy of image and identity.
What emerges from Barth’s practice is more than a visual artifact; it is the ongoing process of self-integration, a form of personal alchemy that collapses the boundaries between inner and outer worlds, between the practical and the metaphysical. Internally, her work is a restless dialogue: a space for metaphysical questioning, for the catharsis that comes with revisiting and transforming the past, for the uneasy but essential coexistence of science and spirituality. “So much of what I make,” Barth reflects, “is about accepting that not everything will resolve or make logical sense, but that the act of creating is, itself, a kind of answer.” This willingness to dwell in uncertainty, to see meaning not as fixed but as emergent, runs through every layer of Barth’s process. The act of reprinting memories, of drawing the past into the present, and then manipulating it by hand, is as much an act of healing as it is of documentation.
“I just get into this space—the “I need to make art” space. It’s hands-on and intuitive, but also I think it’s tethered to the ether somehow, to something bigger than us.”
“The Trail”
In the studio, the rigor of Laura Barth’s scientific background merges seamlessly with the intuitive, hands-on experimentation of the artist. “I just get into this space—the ‘I need to make art’ space. It’s hands-on and intuitive, but also I think it’s tethered to the ether somehow, to something bigger than us,” she says, describing the otherworldly current she taps into. Barth, the scientist, confesses, “I work in the sciences and so I find myself saying, ‘This might sound crazy’ before disclosing I truly think there’s something bigger than us that we can tap into.” Her workflow, then, is a conversation between discipline and surrender: evolving through careful observation and repeated trial, from hot water and brushes to colder water and her fingers for more control, and now favoring 300-pound cold-press watercolor paper for its durability. Barth treats her studio as both laboratory and sanctuary, constantly testing the boundaries of temperature, material, and method, while embracing the unpredictability of torn emulsions and accidental overlays as integral to her final work. This is a practice rooted as much in the methodical as in the metaphysical, a daily balancing act where science and art, control and intuition, skepticism and wonder, all find a home.
Her most recent series, “40 Years,” technically and thematically, is a stark departure. In this recent series, Barth moves beyond past documentation and use of color and nature, instead embracing black and white Polaroid film as her primary material, often taken in camera instead of on the Polaroid Lab. As a result, her work has become more methodical yet still retains the sense of play and intuition that defines her emulsion lift practice. The monochrome palette allows Barth to focus on layering and manipulation, creating images that resonate with a louder but more minimal aesthetic. Her physical manipulation of emulsion lifts has also progressed, with the torn borders, overlapping layers, and subtle distortions that function as both visual interruptions and intentional compositional anchors.
“Electricity”
The series meditates on the “undefined relationships” that shape us. She describes this theme as noticing how different relationships, from a casual encounter to a mentor, can “change your life trajectory,” opening a new path in life. For example, she credits her graduate advisor with steering her beyond horticulture into painting and photography: the mentor “was supportive of my art and developing practice, even when I was focusing on that when I should have been working on my PhD”. These images probe that kind of metamorphosis. Barth says 40 Years isn’t so much a literal biography, but about asking a deeper question about those people and events. “Was it truly profound, or was it just me imagining something deeper, these connections and ripple effects? Ultimately, does it matter?” These pictures interrogate the relationship between synchronicity and meaning by exploiting the layering potential of instant film to create ghostly silhouettes, duplicated frames, and energetic marks to introduce tension to her final pieces, causing your memories to dwell on the images well after viewing.
To spend time with Barth’s work is to step into a visual field where process and presence carry equal weight, where every crease, layer, and imperfection becomes a record of looking for meaning, not as a destination but as an evolving practice. In a culture that rewards seamless stories and tidy resolutions, Barth’s analog experiments insist on the dignity of the unknowable. The torn edges and layered transparencies in “Mythos and Manna” and “40 Years” are not wounds to be hidden, but deliberate openings, evidence of a mind willing to linger in the complexities of becoming. In refusing to settle for either narrative or formal certainty, Barth’s photographs make visible the labor of integrating science and art, memory and invention, discipline and intuition. And rather than offering a single, resolved image, Barth’s work exposes the steps, reversals, and discoveries that shape both the artist and the artwork. The viewer is invited to witness not just what is finished, but what is still unfolding: the trial and error, the accumulation of gesture, and the moments of accident that become new beginnings.
GALLERY
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Laura Barth is an award-winning multidisciplinary artist based in the mountains of North Carolina. Primary media include analog and experimental photographic processes, graphite, charcoal, watercolor, and hand-carved prints. Originally from the Midwest, Laura currently exhibits her work at Calendula gallery in St. Paul, MN and has had work published and exhibited across the country. She currently serves as the Digital Media Consultant for Analog Forever Magazine and is a member of the Beautiful Bizarre Artist Directory.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Michael Behlen is an instant film addict and the founder and publisher of Analog Forever Magazine. Behlen is an obsessive community organizer in the film photography world, including previously launching the independent publishing projects PRYME Magazine and PRYME Editions, two enterprises dedicated to the art of instant film. Through these endeavors, he has featured and published 250+ artists from around the globe via his print and online publications.
He has self-published two Polaroid photobooks -“Searching for Stillness, Vol. 1” and “I Was a Pioneer,” literally a boxed set of his instant film work. His latest book, Searching for Stillness Vol II was published in 2020 by Static Age.
Behlen’s Polaroid photography can be found in various publications including Diffusion Magazine, Fraction Magazine, Seities Magazine, and Polaroid Now (Chronicle Books, 2021). He loves the magic sensuality of instant film: its saturated, surreal colors; the unpredictability of the medium; its addictive qualities as you watch it develop. He spends his time shooting instant film and backpacking in the California wilderness, usually a combination of the two. Connect with Michael Behlen on his Website and on Instagram!
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Laura Barth’s photographic practice is an urgent response to the pressures of twenty-first-century womanhood and motherhood—an alchemical process that merges art and science. Her foundational series, “Mythos and Manna,” transforms digital memories and personal upheaval into layered, mythic images through Polaroid emulsion lifts and handwork, blurring the boundaries between memory, artifact, and healing.