EXiT at Catharine Clark Gallery is pleased to present The Long Way, an artist book and photographs by Susan McLaughlin and Paul d’Orléans. Paul d’Orléans and Susan McLaughlin published their first book of wet-plate photography, The Long Way, with Mexico City art-book publisher La Cooperativa Joplin. The book gathers seventy-five photographs made between 2012 and 2016 while the artists traveled across the United States with their mobile darkroom.
Conceived as a handmade artist’s book, The Long Way is a collaboration among multiple artisans, including Mexico City photogravure specialist Mike Counahan and the team at La Cooperativa Joplin. It premiered at Zona Maco in Mexico City in February 2026 and was subsequently presented at ABC Art Baja in San José del Cabo and Marquesa de Mancera in San Miguel de Allende. The project extends d’Orléans’s broader investigation of legacy technologies and the dedicated practitioners who sustain them, joining his work as a historian and writer with his practice as an image-maker.
Paul d’Orléans (b. 1962) and Susan McLaughlin (b. 1957) are artists based in San Francisco and San José del Cabo whose individual and collaborative practices center on visual culture, material history, and historic photographic processes. D’Orléans is a multidisciplinary artist, curator, and internationally recognized authority on motorcycle culture. After twenty-five years as a decorative painter, he founded The Vintagent in 2006, authoring numerous books and curating museum exhibitions that examine machines as expressions of design and social identity. McLaughlin is a historic-process photographer specializing in nineteenth-century wet-plate collodion. Having studied with acclaimed practitioners like Christopher James and Joni Sternbach, she focuses on the tactile, collaborative, and unpredictable nature of creating images by hand.
As MotoTintype, the husband-and-wife duo collaborate on large-format, wet-plate photography from a mobile darkroom. Traveling across the United States and Mexico, they document the intersections of people, places, and antique machines, bridging distinct communities devoted to living, often obsolete technologies.
