Sustainable Darkroom practice sets out to challenge and transform our toxic legacies in photography, through an ecocentric ethic. Ecology at the centre. And around the middle. And the edge (and beyond!). Ecology as everything - and as such, inclusive of not just the material, but the social, cultural, and political. To focus not solely on water pollution from fixative in relation to environmental health, but also how the silver causing that pollution has a history of colonial exploitation stretching back hundreds of years, into the present day. An ecology of photography - the system entire.
To continue a long tradition of pseudo-ecologists paraphrasing actual ecologists (in this case John Muir) - ‘when you try to pick something out by itself, you find it hooked to the rest of the Universe’. And in the case of Sustainable Darkroom practice, this simple truth is no different. The photographic ecology is not isolated. Indeed, it exists within a wider ecosystem of art making, which exists in a wider-wider ecosystem of culture, which exists in a wider-wider-wider ecosystem of society.
So while we are trudging ahead in our mission to become citizens of photography and not consumers - should we contain this citizenship within our own system? The reality of living in a time of multiplying social crises is that inevitably they overlap, and affect us all. The ecological crisis is not just a crisis of species extinction or rainforest depletion, as surface conservation has historically taught us to think - but it is a crisis exacerbating social and political inequalities worldwide. A crisis that we, as citizens, must address.
It is my belief (and proposal to bore you with in this self-indulgent diatribe), that we cannot contain ourselves any longer. That we must be made to feel uncomfortable about the overlaps and intersections, and pluck at them like an out-of-tune guitar. As Haraway says, the best thing you can do in this era of crisis is show up. Show up and make kin, with all the others facing crisis in an infinity of ways. Solidarity, Sustainable Darkroom style.
That was some of the reasoning behind our curation of The Active Image: Political Ecologies & Photographic Agency (curated in collaboration with Folkhouse Darkroom). Currently running in Bristol at Create Space, it features 21 artists subverting the craft associations of alternative photography by using different processes to confront the political and social dimension. So if you’re looking for a TikTok style tutorial on anthotypes, or printing portraits on a leaf - this ain’t it. Our focus is to challenge the trend that alt/sustainable photo processes are solely for Instagram likes - but can be used to enrich work tackling complex sociopolitical issues worldwide.
So with that in mind, we’ve also curated an online feature to run alongside the physical exhibition. 12 more artists, their work fusing the ecological, political, and social; their use of materials not centre stage, but weaving it all together like an ornate tapestry, stained black by the toxic legacies each artist confronts. Together, we are building an ecology of the darkroom, and an ecology of resistance, in a world of growing adversity.
So without further ado, the selected artists are:
- Anna Andrejew
- Clara Beccaro
- Juan García Couder
- Bruce Dunbar
- Cat Hart
- Rosemary Horn
- Bhumikorn Kongtaveelert
- Derin Korman
- Jules Leaño
- Xander Linger
- Marcela Oñate-Trules
- Inês Quente
- Rebecca Wickham
Anna Andrejew
Anna Andrejew is an artistic researcher and permaculturalist based in The Hague, The Netherlands. Her project Be Like Water looks at irrigation in agriculture, and how “there is no new water on Earth; the air, soil, plants, and water available today are all recycled or regenerated from earlier generations”.
Anna wanted to visually represent the Dutch Research Council’s ‘Closed Cycle’ project, which looked at reusing waste water for irrigation. Corn crops were irrigated with purified wastewater, to study the water’s contamination levels and its movement in the soil. To represent this, Anna made paper from corn leaves (a byproduct of the harvest), then using cyanotype to illustrate the movement of water over time. They were made during a live performance, mimicking the act of watering soil.
Clara Beccaro
Clara Beccaro is an artist studying anthropology at The New School, Paris, France. Their series Refusing Clarity: Processing State Violence in Negative Form, looks at capturing state violence through alternative processes.
Considering the role of film negatives in capturing and processing state violence, Clara uses pictures captured while researching policing in France. Conducting ethnographic research, Clara uses film negatives and cyanotype to “approach the various manifestations of state violence”. As a photo series, they “consider what happens when moments of political harm are over-exposed, made obscure, or pieced apart. Using three protocols of piecing apart and juxtaposition, wear and tear, and stitching, the works are “intended to cultivate “opacity as a political act” (Glissant, 1977)”.
Juan García Couder
Juan García Couder is a Spanish artist whose work explores photography as a process, rather than focusing on the final image. Juan’s work centres the photographic process, embracing its ephemeral materiality. Uadi is a series of cyanotypes on glass, the term from Arabic, referring to the channel of a river that remains dry for extended periods of time. “It names a landscape shaped by traces of water, and its idiosyncratic absence,” writes Juan.
The initial two series of plates happened simultaneously between 15th January and 18th March. Every 7 days, Juan collected water samples to make cyanotype chemigrams over the surface of the glass. Each time, the prints disappeared in contact with the water, and a new image began. This follows the same dripping technique Juan developed in his project Clepsydra, where Juan made prints using a process similar to ancient Egyptian timers, through a process of dripping, sedimentation, and crystallisation. The Uadi series is conceived to be immediately erased, as a performance that restarts with the photograph.
Bruce Dunbar
Bruce Dunbar is a photographic artist based in Westchester County, USA. Working across processes, he attempts to capture the state of flux in which all organic matter is caught. This series, with the working title Exchanges, documents the peculiar Ghost Pipe, a flowering plant native to his home. The plant is unusual in that its root system interconnects with the underground network of fungi as a parasite, as opposed to a symbiotic relationship. “The Ghost Pipe benefits at the expense of the mycorrhizal fungi, and gives nothing in return,” writes Bruce.
The Indigenous North Americans used Ghost Plants in ceremonies to awaken the spirit world, symbolising resilience and spiritual healing. Bruce photographed the series on expired film stock, and developed then in homemade developers. Since Ghost Pipes lack chlorophyll, Bruce made an extraction from Golden Alexander leaves, as well as a waste extraction of red potato peels. He feels this reflects the parasitic relationship of Ghost Pipes, as the plants receive nothing in return for activating the emulsion during development.
Cat Hart
Cat Hart is a British artist living on the unceded lands of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skxwú7mesh (Squamish) & səlil̓wətaʔɬ (Tsleil-Waututh), also known as Vancouver, British Columbia. Their piece explores trains as a tool of colonialism, industrialisation, and progress - and the life of land after a railway becomes disused. The Arbutus Corridor is one such site, once used to connect Vancouver to Stevenson’s fishing and canning industry. The region has a history of mass dispossession of Indigenous peoples through the Indian Act, and the exploitation of Chinese migrants to build railways connecting BC to the rest of Canada.
After being abandoned, the land was purchased by City of Vancounver and turned into Arbutus Greenway, where people can ride bikes beside “garden plots, untamed blackberry bushes, and a plethora of plants that take advantage of and thrive on disturbed lands” with an “ominous sign that says ‘Arbutus Ends” concluding the track, writes Cat. Their piece was made using double exposures, archival images, digital photography, and the wet cyanotype process. They used invasive species as photograms, to highlight the loss of native plants.
Rosemary Horn
Rosemary Horn is a photographic artist based in Wellington, New Zealand, with a wish to tread lightly on the Earth when making photographic images. These works are made using the chlorophyll printing process, reflecting on how New Zealand’s land has changed over time due to the presence of colonial settlers, and their “need to strip the land to its bare bones,” states Rosemary.
Early colonisers saw the native forest as needing to be placed under control, believing that land that was not ‘productive’ was being wasted, resulting in the devastation of the landscape. Island reserves were being established early on in the 1890s, as a way to limit the destruction of ecosystems and the impact on local wildlife. Wood was a valuable resource for early colonisers, and so saw a large destruction of forested lands. Brook Valley, which Rosemary’s images depict, is a pine plantation that is slowly converting back to native trees, supported by community “community trapping groups and residents who trap and hunt their own blocks and properties”. It is now significantly richer in native wildlife, as well as a place for recreation for locals.
Bhumikorn Kongtaveelert
Bhumikorn Kongtaveelert based in Stanford, USA. At eight years old, Bhumikorn and his family were caught in the Great Flood in Nakhon Sawan, Thailand. “I still viscerally remember walking against the flood to get into our home, and saw the water fill up the entirety of the four-meter-tall first floor in the span of a few hours,” writes Bhumikorn. During the flood, his family fought to preserve family photographs and heirlooms, an experience he revisited in 2023 while going through his family archive.
In an effort to resist ‘Levee Syndrome’, where people ‘contained not only the river but also the ability to remember and thus imagine water differently’ in an effort to forget about the flood, Bhumikorn digital altered his archives to prepare for the loss of personal and familial memories during natural disasters. He feels this intervention helped build climate resilience. In 2024, he then found some family photographs chemically altered by the floods - turning this hypothetical process into reality. “Observing this physical and chemical aliveness of photographs became another ongoing exercise in looking for life that emerges from the solastalgic ruins of climate change,” states Bhumikorn.
Derin Korman
Derin Korman is an artist based in the United States. Derin has created a video work, titled On the Borders of Photographic Knowledge, exploring the colonial history of natural taxonomies. Derin has combined algae cyanotype photograms made in the Aegean waters between Turkey and Greece, with a neural network trained on Anna Atkins’ well known cyanotype series, Photographs of British Algae. Drawing on this archive, Derin highlights how the extractive logic of colonialism is preserved in our botanical archives, as Atkins used her husband’s family who were merchants in the East India Trading company
The video documents attempts by the machine learning to locate Derin’s prints within the network, in an attempt to “reveal the prescriptive nature of scientific knowledge that shapes our capacity to observe and understand” by “using tools that mediate our daily interactions to uncover spaces where information is transformed,” they state. This then draws on the tensions between the “interdependent nature of meaning-making and our desire for singular truth”.
Sound is provided from the BBC archives, from 1922, the same year as the end of the Greco-Turkish war, and the brokering of the Lausanne treaty by the British that opened oil-rich Eastern Mediterranean and Iraq to 20th Century colonial trade.
Jules Leãno
Jules Leaño is an artist and anthropologist based in Berlin, concerned with the relationship between moving image, media, and collective understandings, and connected sociopolitical realities. Their project, Winter / Summer / Winter is a performative installation, using loops of archival footage of winter and summer holidays, projected onto frozen water, contaminated with various chemicals (e.g. hydrogen peroxide, sodium percarbonate, acetic acid).
The projection melts the water, which is then collected in a fishtank lined with fogged and developed film on a projection loop. The emulsion is then compromised by the contaminated water, peeling off of the film base. Degrading the film, it also impacts the ability of the projector to run, existing as “an auto-destructive installation, that destroys itself as it runs, serving as a metaphor for the debates around climate change,” states Jules.
Xander Linger
Xander Linger is an Australian artist and photographer based in the surrounding area of Melbourne. Having recently moved to the area, Xander has been taking frequent walks in the Sherbrooke forest area with his newborn baby, populated by Eucalyptus Regnans - a tree with multiple connections to the exploitative colonial legacies of the region.
Photographing both his family, and the features of the forest, on medium format film - Xander then processed them in an extraction made from the Eucalyptus bark, combined with water from Sherbrooke creek. These were then enlarged using the same recipe, as a reflection on the false dichotomy between “the natural/unnatural or the human/nonhuman divide” by depicting moments of ‘intra-action “where the all-too-human invisible hand continues to leave its history deep in seemingly pristine ‘natural’ forest,” writes Xander.
With this inspired by Karen Barad’s dismantling of the subject-object relationship, Xander similarly aims for the series to add personal questions of raising a baby in this increasingly unstable world, “and how our current (in)decisions are leaving their trace upon and within my little girl”.
Marcela Oñate-Trules
Marcela Oñate-Trules is a lens-based artist based between Southern Chile and Northern California, who sees her practice as ‘embodied archiving’, blending experimental formats to create audiovisual records of the stories of people and territories close to her heart. The images, Somos Truful Truful: Llaima Mapu, We Tripantu, were taken in Gulumapu, on the ancestral territor of the Mapuche nation, in Chile.
The images were developed with water from Rio Truful Truful, and a chestnut-based extraction, then fixed in sea salt harvested from the Pacific Ocean in Cahuil, Chile. Chestnut trees were brought to the region by European colonisers, and now grow abundantly and are used in both the diet and culture of Chilean and Mapuche communities. The images are of Marcela’s friend, Kintudh, and her grandmother, Ercillia. They were taken on Mapuche New Year, We Tripantu, correlating with the winter solstice, on the land her family reforested.
Combining the river and Kintudh and her grandmother via the double exposure technique, the images explore how the river is constantly threatened by neoliberal extractivism in the form of plantation agriculture, contamination, and more. “Mapuche communities have been fighting for more than a decade to protect this river— as in the Mapuche cosmovision the river is home to the spirits, and when the waters are sick the people become sick,” writes Marcela.
Inês Quente
Inês Quente is an artist that lives and works between the two banks of the River Douro, Vila Nova de Gaia, and Porto, Portugal. The work, Jardim Branco (White Garden), is a photographic series “that reveals predictions of the future territories that make up the Branca region, in Albergaria-a-Velha, Portugal, harbingers of times yet to come,” writes Inês. They aim to explore how the region, which has been inhabited since the Neolithic period, and is rich in cultural and historical heritage, is also poor in environmental and civilisational biodiversity, due to the cultivation of cellulose in the past 50 years.
The work documents Quinta das Relvas, a farm which stands out from the deserted and eroded Branca region, where Inês did a residency. Within the farm there is a permaculture vegetable garden, an area of native forest, and an agroforest. Jardim Branco considers the future of the degraded landscape, and what form it will take, with alternatives like Quinta das Relvas considered. This takes the form of an installation, composed of 6 naturally toned glass cyanotypes, soil from the region, UV tape, canson crista paper, and wild plants from Quinta das Relvas.
Rebecca Wickham
Rebecca Wickham is an Australian documentary photographer based in London. Her project, Kaolin Landscape, is a combination of documentary photography and cameraless techniques, looking at clay mining in St. Austell, Cornwall. Clay (kaolin) mining in the region began over 250 years ago, and since has radically transformed the 90km2 stretch of land.
Rebecca writes how “the process of extraction displaces colossal amounts of earth” with “9 tonnes of earth” removed for every one tonne of raw clay. This results in ever-expanding stockpiles of waste (stent, sand, and mica) that have accumulated in the area. These have formed ‘sky tips’, artificial hills that exist as a surreal landscape, recording the traces of land exploitation. Typically, kaolin has been used as a filler and coating for paper - including the glossy surface of photographic paper in the 20th Century, revealing the contradiction between photography as tool for documentation and the material costs of its production.
The cameraless images were created by burying silver gelatin paper in sand and stent waste from decommissioned pits, exposed under moonlight, then developed with plants growing on waste tips. They were then fixed in a mixture of salt and mica-filled wastewater from the site.
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If you enjoyed reading about these works, visit the in-person exhibition in Bristol, UK, at Create Center, BS1 6XN. The exhibition is on until the 26th Septmber, open Monday to Friday, 9AM to 6PM. And if you have any questions about the works featured, feel free to get in touch.
Edd Carr
Project Lead
Sustainable Darkroom
Image copyright reserved to the stated artists.