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Paper short abstract

Employing trace as a methodology, this paper follows Kodak's toxic legacy by engaging visually, chemically, and materially with contaminated ecologies. Foraging plants and transforming them into photochemistry, it traces how ecologies archive, witness, and make visible Kodak contamination.

Paper long abstract

At its industrial height, Kodak’s photographic empire depended on vast chemical infrastructures with enduring toxic legacies in the landscapes and waterways of Rochester, New York, unceded territory of the Onöndowa'ga: (Seneca Nation). This paper responds to Ariella Azoulay’s call to interrogate the violences implicit in our vision practices. It shifts attention from photographic images to the toxic material relations that make photography possible. Conceptualising photography not as an image-object but as assemblages of chemical, ecological, and social relations, this paper traces how Kodak-contaminated ecologies register and witness chemical violence in delayed and dispersed ways.

Drawing on foraging as an ethnographic method and experimental analogue photography as research practice, the project transforms plants growing in Kodak-contaminated ecologies into low-toxic photo-chemistries. These plant-chemistries are used to process photographs of sites touched by Kodak pollution, extending photographic indexicality beyond visual content to consider what photographs point to through their very materiality.

Methodologically, foraging for photo-chemistry proposes a low-toxic, multimodal approach that confronts photography’s toxic histories while reimagining it as a practice of ecological relation and political attention in Anthropocene worlds.