Selected works
Legacies of Photographic Silver
Desert Treasure
Among The Weeds And The Waste
a:yetíya' dágeha’ [We Should Help Her]
Red. Lined.
Scarify
The City That Kodak Built
[de]compose
LAND / SEAS / SUN
©2024 Alice Cazenave
2022
35mm film developed in plant photo-chemistry (Yellow rabbitbrush desert species)
[In press] TRAJECTORIA 2025 vol. 6
These works were made at abandoned mining sites in regions now known as The Comstock, Nevada. The extraction of this silver in the 1850s enabled early European developments in photography, which relied on silver to make photographic emulsions.
Among The Weeds And The Waste explores the ecological afterlives of film photographic industries, and what grows in these human-disturbed spaces. Yellow rabbitbrush is a plant that grows abundantly in alkaline soils typical of silver extraction sites. It revegetates land and establishes habitats disturbed by resource extraction.
These photographic images were developed in chemistry made from Yellow rabbitbrush. The works consider the toxicities of silver extraction for photography which are not immediately visible; toxicity is buried in the earth or present in sites of absence – where things no longer exist.
Yellow rabbitbrush, however, is an indicator of such sites; it makes these legacies visible. The use of Yellow rabbitbrush developer foregrounds the ecologies that are constructed as dispensable by extractivism for analogue photographic industries.