Legacies of Photographic Silver

Legacies of Photographic Silver: Entangled Geologies, Histories & Lives

2022 - 2025
Goldsmiths, University of London
Funded by a 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 main manufacturing plant in New York.