LEGACIES OF PHOTOGRAPHIC SILVER

2022 - 2025

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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. 

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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.

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Working with U.S silver miners, KODAK engineers, conservationists, and Native American  peoples, I explore how people relate to silver, 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 ecologies, people, and silver.

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Fieldwork is centred in historical silver extraction sites, Nevada, and Rochester, home of KODAK's main manufacturing plant in New York.