ARTIST BIO
Alice Cazenave (b.1990) is a photographic artist and doctoral researcher. She is based between London and New York, and is a visiting scholar at the Rochester Institute of Technology, Rochester, NY.
Her photography is informed by her background in molecular science. Created using hand-mixed, plant-based chemistries, Cazenave's work reimagines alternative futures of analogue photography that move away from its toxic history.
Cazenave’s (AHRC) PhD examines the afterlives of photographic metals and chemistries, and how these change people's lives and ecologies. This informs her visual enquiries into the photographic potential of plants. Cazenave innovated the use of pelargonium printing, a photographic process that uses living leaves as photographic paper. This early work inspired her later interest in making photographic chemistry from plants.
Cazenave is the Executive Director at the Sustainable Darkroom, a not-for-profit organisation researching lower-toxicity photographic methods. As part of her work with the Sustainable Darkroom, she is the 2024 artist-in-residence at Hong Kong International Photo Festival.
Cazenave has exhibited internationally, and has been published in The British Journal of Photography and New York Times, as well as PLANT: Exploring the Botanical World, Phaidon Press.
ARTIST STATEMENT
My practice examines the complex and often forgotten relationships between photographic materials and the Anthropocene. I research the metals and minerals that comprise analogue images. Silver coats photographic film and generates images by being struck by light. It is this essential metal that makes analogue photography possible. I am interested in how ecologies enable photography – through providing silver, and absorbing photographic waste and pollution.
In my work I explore the agencies of ecologies and how they link to analogue industries, by engaging with them visually. I develop and use plant-based photographic chemistries that are lower-toxicity and generate photographs inside living leaves.
I am interested in what analogue photography means to people. I am currently generating an alternative archive of photography’s history – one that foregrounds links between photographic silver, ecologies, and people.
SELECTED EXHIBITIONS
Upcoming
2024
London Art Fair: Modern and Contemporary Art Fair
London, U.K
MINE: What is Ours in the Wake of Extraction
Special Collections Gallery, University of Delaware, U.S.A
2023
Climate & Art: Alternative Approaches
Chappe Art Museum, Ekenäs, Finland
Spontaneous Fermentation
SET, London, U.K
Beyond Silver
Hive Gallery, Birmingham, U.K
2022
ÖRES summer exhibition
Öro island, Finland
2021
Fabric of Photography: Material Matters
Photo Oxford, U.K
WHAT ON EARTH
Koppel, Piccadilly, London, U.K
2020
TERRA NEXUS
Proposition, London, U.K
ARTIST RESIDENCIES
Upcoming
2024
Hong Kong International Photo Festival artist-in-residence,
Hong Kong
2022
Silver City Artist-in-residence, Nevada, U.S.A
ÖRES, Öro island, Finland
2020-21
Resident Photographic Tutor, Koppel Projects, London, U.K
2020
TEST. GROW. TEACH. LEARN, Guest Projects, London, U.K
2019
Recycle | Remove | Repurpose | Rework, Guest Projects, London, U.K
ACADEMIC PROJECTS
Cazenave is a practice-bsed PhD candidate in visual anthropology. She was awarded the competitive CHASE Arts and Humanities Research Council scholarship for her research into the precious metals used in analogue photography.
Her research engages with photographic silver. She traces this metal from its extraction to processing into photographic paper and film. Through long-term engagement with Kodak engineers, ecologists, analogue photographers, and communities living in extracted landscapes, Cazenave explores the histories of photographic silver, and the ecologies and lives that are touched by it.
She is pleased to be the visiting scholar at R.I.T, Rochester, New York. She is engaging with graduate students to design a Photographic Garden which explores the the roles of plants as photographic materials.
Cazenave was the part of the 2023 TRACTS Fellowship at Leiden University, Netherlands. She was invited to speak as part of DeMontfort University's annual conference Photography in its Environment, 2023.
As part of her PhD fieldwork, Cazenave was invited to Silver City, Nevada as their artist-in-residence in 2022. She will be exhibiting photographic artworks from this residency as part of MINE: What is Ours in the Wake of Extraction, Delaware University, 2024.