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 - 2025
Goldsmiths, University of London
As part of a long-term engagement with communities living in the United States, this research 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, I explore how people relate to silver extraction, and how it entangles with their histories, worlds and lives. I combine 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.
I research plants living in abandoned silver mines and Kodak-contaminated landscapes. I mix these plants into low-toxic, plant-based photographic chemistries to develop photographs of landscapes touched by Kodak. I use these to open up dialogues about 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.
This research recieved a three year grant from Arts and Humanities Research Council, U.K.