Blue Mud: Entangled Geologies and Lives of Photographic Silver
2022 - 2025
Goldsmiths, University of London
Funded by the Arts & Humanities Research Council 3 year grant
As part of a long-term engagement with communities living in the United States, Blue Mud examines the lives and ecologies that are touched by silver extraction and processing for media industries.
Formally known as blue mud, 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 and we live in a critical time where media culture and pollution are affecting people and places in disproportionate ways.
Engaging with U.S silver miners, Kodak scientists, environmental regulators, and Native American peoples, this research examined how the Kodak industry and its processing of silver impacted people’s lives and ecologies. It combined photography, sound, ethnography, and other kinds of multimodal engagements into an alternative archive of photography's history - one that foregrounds links between silver, Settler-colonialism, and ecology.
The project followed silver’s extraction from the unceded lands of Waší:šiw, Nɨɨmɨ peoples in Nevada, to Kodak’s largest chemical plant in Rochester, New York - homelands of the Hodinöhšö:ni Confederacy.
This research involved working visually, chemically, and materially with plants living in Kodak-contamined landscapes. Plants were mixed into into low-toxic, plant photo-chemistries to develop images of landscapes touched by Kodak. These photographic works were used to open up dialogues surrounding the material base of film photography and its chemical and colonial legacy.
The Metabolism of Film
Maps that visualise territories, solvents, metals, ecologies and bodies that collide with photographic silver. The maps trace the multi-temporal mobilisations of these matter onto a single plane, making visible the chemical and colonial infrastructures that are otherwise masked from view.
Photographic Garden
2024
Rochester Institute of Technology
Visiting scholar in Art & Sustainability
The project supported MFA Photography students in the design and planting of a Photographic Garden, the first of its kind in the United States.
A Photographic Garden grows plants that can be used as darkroom materials. These include species for creating photographic toners, plant-based chemistries, and emulsions. The garden also planted species that remediate Kodak contaminants like cadmium, mercury and chromium. Used historically by the Kodak industry for manufacturing film emulsions, these heavy metals now contaminate Rochester’s waterways and ecologies.
Lectures and workshops were designed around the garden project to support students in thinking critically about the toxicity of film photography, its industries, and praxes.