Selected works
Legacies of Photographic Silver
The City That Kodak Built
a:yetíya' dágeha’ [We Should Help Her]
Scarify
Red. Lined.
Desert Treasure
Among The Weeds And The Waste
[de]compose
LAND / SEAS / SUN
Breathe
©2024 Alice Cazenave
2024
35mm film of Kodak City landscapes
Hand developed in photo-chemistry made from oak and beech trees lining East Avenue (home of George Eastman, founder of Kodak).
At its peak, Kodak was New York State’s top polluter. Its chemical legacy is significant, affecting river systems, neighbourhoods, and landscapes in delayed and dispersed ways.
These negatives depicting Rochester, home of Kodak, were shaken with grit to disturb the emulsion surface. The grit was gathered from highways dissecting the city. While the Kodak industry has now largely left, these highways once allowed Kodak CEOs to enter from their suburban homes.
The film was then hand-developed in plant photo-chemistry mixed from plants foraged from wealthy areas of the city. Thinking through the ecological damage caused the Kodak industry, this act of scratching and weakening the film surface mimics ‘scarification’. This is a process that certain seed species require to germinate later in the year. Scarification is a natural weakening or breaking of the seed coat and is essential for new plant life to grow. With changing temperatures and rain fall levels, processes of scarification risk becoming compromised. This work thinks about the roles of media industries in the Anthropocene and more specifically, how photographic silver changes peoples lives and the future worlds that are being built.