Doctoral Research

Legacies of Photographic Silver

2022 - 2026
Goldsmiths, University of London
Funded by a competitive three year grant from the Arts & Humanities Research Council

As part of a long-term engagement with communities living in the United States, Legacies of Photographic Silver examines the lives that are touched by analogue photographic industries.

Silver grounds the magic of analogue photography; it is the essential light-sensitive coating of photographic negatives. Silver exists in specific territories and is mobilised across the globe to enable media culture. We live in a critical time where media culture and pollution are affecting people and places in disproportionate ways.

Working with U.S silver miners, KODAK engineers, conservationists, and Native American peoples, this research explores how people relate to silver extraction, and how it entangles with their histories, worlds and lives. It combines photography, sound, ethnography and other kinds of multimodal engagements into an alternative archive of analogue photography's history - one that foregrounds links between settler-colonialism, ecology, and silver.

A significant part of this research involves studying the plants that live in abandoned silver mines and Kodak-contaminated landscapes. These plants are mixed into into low-toxic, plant-based photographic chemistries to develop photographs of landscapes touched by Kodak. These visual engagements are used to open up dialogues surrounding the material base of film photography and its chemical and colonial legacy.

Fieldwork is centred in historical silver extraction sites in Nevada, homelands of Northern Paiute, Shoshone and Washoe peoples, and the city of Rochester, homelands of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy and site of Kodak's largest chemical plant in New York.

Photographic Garden

2024
Rochester Institute of Technology
Visiting scholar in Art & Sustainability

As part of a visiting scholar position at Rochester Insititute of Technology’s Photography MFA programme, I supported students to design and plant a Photographic Garden, the first of its kind in the United States.

A Photographic Garden grow plants that can be used as darkroom materials. These include species for creating photographic toners, plant-based chemistries, and emulsions. Kodak’s head quarters and largest chemical plant is in Rochester. The contamination from the industry is significant and far-reaching. The project also planted species that remediate contaminants like cadmium, mercury and chromium. These heavy metals were used historically in film emulsion recipes and contaminate Rochester’s waterways and ecologies today. Certain plant species can remediate these metals from the earth. They can then be transformed into ingredients for low-toxic darkroom chemistries.

Students were invited to explore the agencies of these plants by engaging with them visually, chemically, and materially. Lectures and workshops surrounding the garden project supported students to think critically about the toxicity of Kodak (established in Rocehster, NY) as well as photographic cultures of making.

Many thanks to R.I.T for the invitation to share knowledge.