Lou Bou
About the Artist
Lou Bou is a Montreal-based photographer who recently graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Photography from Concordia University. Their work focuses on tintype portraiture - a 19th-century photographic technique - while also engaging with textile arts. Lou’s practice delves into trans and marginalized identities, using the studio environment to foster community, care and repair. By confronting historical processes with contemporary issues, they question access to archives and explore how forgotten narratives continue to resurface.
Lou Bou developing a tintype
About the Project
Lou Bou’s project, developed during their residency, is an alchemical journey through the landscape, using outdoor tintype photography as a means to read the land through chemistry. Equipped with a portable darkroom, Bou wandered along the river’s edge, capturing rocks and shoreline not only in image, but in reaction — silver nitrate meeting metal beneath shifting skies. The process is slow, stubborn, and deeply attuned to its environment. Temperature, humidity, and light shift by the hour, altering the chemistry with each attempt. A single photograph might require an entire day of waiting, hoping for the right alignment of elements. There is something quietly spiritual in this patience — a ritual blending labor and chance. Each plate bears the mark of the day it was made, its mood and conditions etched into the surface. More than a document, each image becomes a collaboration with the landscape itself: an offering, a trace, a fleeting moment caught in metal and light.
