Polyphenyl Dark

2025

Photo-emulsion on reclaimed greenhouse glass
Developed with low-toxic developer chemistry
Aluminium frame
Silver plated in waste photographic fix

Commissioned by Ratamo Gallery, Finland for the exhibition My Work Here Is Done
07.05 - 29.06.2025

Polyphenyl Dark is a sculpture examining the dark edges of photographic industries and their wealth. The piece is inspired by the chandelier hanging in George Eastman’s mansion (founder of Kodak).

Named after a chemical dye used in early film, Polyphenyl Dark thinks about the violence of photo-chemical industries and the uneven distribution of their wealth and contamination. Today in Rochester New York, home of Kodak, the reverberations of the industry’s chemical violence are weighted along racial and economic lines. At its peak, Kodak released 9.2 million pounds/year of methylene chloride, a suspected carcinogen required to help make film bases. This was the largest source of this kind of pollution in the entire United States.

Acknowledging the chemical violence embedded in photo-materials, this piece was made with methods that help detoxify some of photography’s key processes:

Each glass pane in the sculpture is exposed to create a matt black, camera-less photograph. A low-toxic sodium ascorbate chemistry was used to develop the black tones on each glass pane. By binding to them, this homemade chemistry blocks the toxicity of heavy metals present in the photographic emulsion.

This practice of detoxifying-through-making is extended to the chandelier’s frame. The frame was soaked in waste fixer chemistry. This allowed harmful silver particles in the fixer to transfer from the solution, onto the frame. This soaking silver-plates the chandelier and simultaneously detoxifies the chemistry for disposal.

Excerpt of exhibiton text, My Work Here Is Done

07.05-29.06.2025
Ratamo Gallery, Finland

The exhibition deconstructs common materials in photography and their environmental, social, and political impacts. It unveils hidden violences embedded in photographic materials and chemistries, and questions their legacies in the face of contemporary crisis. Through this material breakdown, we can hope to envision a regenerative future for photographic materials, where toxicity and routine violence are not accepted as inherent, but questioned and reformed.

The title of the exhibition paraphrases the suicide note of George Eastman (founder of Kodak), reading, ‘To my friends, my work is done – why wait?’. But in an era of ecological crisis, photography’s material impact is being re-examined. With the work very much not done, the exhibiting artists are working at the forefront of low-toxic methods to reform and reshape Eastman’s legacy in view of a sustainable future.