EXCLUSIVE: 49 Extraordinary Vintage Portraits of Hollywood's Most Famous Faces

UPDATE: Have a look at some behind-the-scenes footage provided by our friends at Flying Giant HERE.

At last year's Sundance Film Festival, photographer Victoria Will challenged herself to take tintype portraits of various celebrities, and convinced Bill Hader, Anne Hathaway, Nick Cave, and dozens of others to sit for the process.

Developed during the mid-to-late–19th century, the technique involves coating a thin sheet of metal, or plate, with a syrupy substance called collodion, photo-sensitizing the collodion with silver nitrate, and exposing the plate to light. Tintype photography requires both speed and patience: Since the plate is wet when it is inserted into the camera, there's a limited window during which it can be used, and any and all movement while the image is being captured will show up in the resulting shot.

Will returned to Sundance this year to follow up on what she'd learned about the process, and spent the past week shooting stunning, old-timey portraits of Ethan Hawke, Jack Black, James Franco, Ewan McGregor, and many other celebrities attending the film festival. The results, as you can see here exclusively on Esquire and Elle, are spectacular, despite the difficulties inherent with photographing in-demand celebrities at a constantly moving event using an antiquated technique.

"You can't speed the process up and you cannot fake it in post," says Will, who collaborated this year with the Penumbra Foundation, a New York City–based non-profit arts-and-education organization. "You have only one opportunity to decide in camera what to include and so both parties, photographer and subject, really collaborate to produce the image. And in the end, we invested in each other to make a picture that will last forever."

Photos by Victoria Will/Invision/AP

Wet plate work by Geoffrey Berliner and Jolene Lupo

Crew: Taylor Jewell and Dan Brouillette

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