Alice Cazenave
Bio
Selected works
Research commissions
Exhibitions
Publications
©2026 Alice Cazenave
Bio
Selected works
Research commissions
Exhibitions
Publications
©2026 Alice Cazenave
Between Aesthetics and Annihilation:
Visualising the Anthropocene in the American West
2025-26Ansel Adams Research Fellowship
Commissioned by the Centre for Creative Photography, University of Arizona
Work in progress
This project draws on the Ansel Adams Archive at the Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona, Tucson. It explores the link between photographic aesthetics and environmental destruction, focusing on photography’s historical use of toxic heavy metals to enhance clarity and tonal range. Tracing these materials to sites such as Kodak’s pollution of the Genesee River in Rochester, New York, it reframes aesthetics as a form of chemical violence rather than purely visual composition.
The work transforms plants into photographic chemistries, using them to print landscapes of the American West—long celebrated by Ansel Adams. The prints are toned with plant toners; together these approaches consider what a low-toxic aesthetic looks like in photography. Excerpts from Adams’s conservationist writings and the chemical names of toxic toners used in his prints are embedded into the paper fibres, visible only when viewed from the correct angle.
Many disciplines use visual media to help us understand the Anthropocene, but this project uncovers hidden relations between images and environments, looking at the materials that constitute media, and how these contribute to the Anthropocene in delayed and dispersed ways. This project engages critically with conservationist discourse within photography, examining how photography is materially complicit in the production of polluted landscapes that it seeks to defend.