Defender Velour Black, expired December 1924, processed in 2013 (#2)

Alison Rossiter explores the image-making possibilities of expired, unexposed photographic materials. In 2007, she acquired a box of Eastman Kodak Kodabromide E3 paper that had been good until May 1946. When she put a sheet of paper from that package in developer, an image emerged on the unexposed paper that looked like an abstract graphite drawing. The paper was at the edge of viability because of chemical changes it had undergone due to time, the nature of the material, and the vagaries of handling and atmospheric conditions. Rossiter began to explore the latent images made by time and circumstance, and to register what survives of the properties of tonality, surface, or texture that had made the paper valuable to photographers in the past. She has made a variety of abstraction images by pouring, dipping, or pooling chemistry on the paper, including this diptych, Defender Velour Black, expired December 1924, processed in 2013 (#2).
--Carol Squiers, Curator