UK Edition
Secret traces: how expired photo paper caught the imagination of the art world
Most photographers would be horrified at the presence of mould or water damage on their photographic paper, but both are exciting to New york artist Alison Rossiter. “If it’s doing something nasty to the paper, then that’s just fabulous. I love it,” she says.
Over the last eight years, Rossiter, 62, has collected more than 2,500 boxes of expired, unprocessed photo paper from as far afield as Siberia and South America - the oldest boxes date from the 1890s. She stores them all at her studio, where, in her darkroom, she turns them sheet by sheet into eerily delicate, abstract pieces that have captured the imagination of the art world - today her prints sell for thousands of dollars.
After studying at the Rochester Institute of Technology and the Banff Centre School of Fine Arts, Rossiter worked as a photographer for 20 years, including eight years in photography conservation. Then, in the late Nineties, she began making photograms, where images are created without a camera by placing objects directly onto photographic paper and exposing them to light.
Her eureka moment came when looking for cheap sources of paper for her photograms on eBay. She bought a large box of 8X10 Kodak Kodabromide E3 paper which had expired in 1946, developed one of the unexposed sheets and was astonished to see an abstract image fully-formed on the paper. “It looked as if someone had drawn in graphite from corner to corner,” she tells me.
Rossiter was hooked. In those days, boxes of expired paper cost just a few dollars and she bought everything she could lay her hands on. Wanting to know more about the materials she was working with she contacted Nora Kennedy, who runs the conservation department at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. Two years of volunteering later she secured a position in a photographic conservation studio nearby, where she worked on pieces by renowned contemporary photographers such as Thomas Demand and Andreas Gursky, learning everything about paper’s complex chemistry along the way.
To make her own pieces, she has perfected particular techniques. Sometimes she immerses part of the paper into the developer, which creates an in impressionistic landscape-like image on its surface. On other occasions she dips the sheets into the chemical several times to produce geometric shapes and shadows. More often she will rely on the biology of the paper, which she compares to "the DNA of an extinct animal."
It takes 48 hours to make one of her pieces. “I need privacy," she says. "I make sure I have plenty of food in the fridge and do nothing but print; I often don’t leave the house for two weeks.”
One of her most exciting purchases was an extremely rare paper called Satsista, a gelatin silver emulsion with a platinum coat on top, and a favourite of photographers such as Paul Strand and Alfred Stieglitz. There were just four unexposed sheets left in the package. Best of all is when she finds the fingerprints of the previous owner have touched the paper and disturbed the emulsion. “I’m wild about those,” says Rossiter. “Here I am, standing in the 21st Century, connecting to another photographer from the 19th Century.”
Alison's Rossiters prints form part of the exhibition Light, Paper, Process: Reinventing Photography at the Getty Center in California, until 6 September 2015
Rossiter is represented by Yossi Milo Gallery, New York