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SAN ANTONIO Photography as medium has reached maximum saturation. Any snap-happy amateur now owns at least three cameras--the requisite digital, the point-and-click cell phone, the webcam--to document every Kodak-worthy (or not) moment. But if "Casting a New Light," a group exhibition opening at the Southwest School of Art and Craft, is any indication, the backlash against "insta-art" is on. Ten artists snub this-minute digitization in favor of archaic work--daguerreotypes, calotype negatives, salt prints, tintypes--that requires a glossary to understand. And their 61 images make a strong case for creating art the old-fashioned way. To wit: Irving Pobboravsky's modern daguerreotypes of animal skulls, ceramic pots, and densely thicketed landscapes evoke a suspended, Roald Dahl-esque reality. Equally haunting are the tintypes by Jayne Hinds Bidaut, a Fort Worth native whose Human Skeleton, Homo sapien is a lingering study in light and silhouette; the shadowy figure looks as if it's about to step out from behind a translucent curtain.

Not all of the subjects are so eerie. You'll get a chuckle from Dana Moore's penciled-in additions to nineteenth-century photographs, like the kooky pair of goggles on a solemn-faced man who surely didn't see this coming when he sat for his portrait (above). But the most chord-striking series comes from Deborah Luster, who, in an attempt to make sense of her mother's murder, visited three Louisiana prisons and photographed thousands of inmates....

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