The Disappearance of Darkness: Photography at the End of the Analogue Era

Exhibition curated by Gaëlle Morell

Ryerson Image Centre, Ryerson University, Toronto, Canada

January 22–April 13, 2014

The Disappearance of Darkness is a traveling exhibition of Robert Burley’s photographs organized and circulated by the Ryerson Image Centre in Toronto. The exhibition was on display at the National Gallery of Canada and the Musée Nicéphore Niépce from October 2013 to January of 2014, and following its spring exhibition at Ryerson it will travel to the George Eastman House International Museum of Photography and Film in the fall of 2014. The exhibition is drawn from Burley’s project documenting the end of mass-produced, chemical-based photography, which the subtitle of the exhibition describes as the end of the analogue era. The exhibition documents the loss of a way of photographing while moving beyond nostalgia to reflect on photography’s digital present.

The project began with Burley’s 2005 decision to document the closure of Kodak Canada’s Toronto facility. At the time, he thought the restructuring of the industry, and thus the project, would be localized. However, by 2007, it was clear that the difficulties were industry-wide and that most of the photographic materials he used in his practice were being affected. Based on this realization, he expanded the project to document the companies whose products he had a personal relationship with in his photography practice. Hence, this project does not represent either Fuji or Eastern European production sites. In other words, the project is not a systematic attempt to document the changes in the field of photography. It is a more reflective and personal project produced by a Canadian photographer whose vision and choices offer a particular take on the demise of industrial color film production and its implications for photography as an industry, a practice, a technology, and an art form.

The exhibition is organized geographically by manufacturing site (Toronto, Rochester, Chalon-sur-Saône, Mobberley, Mortsel, and Enschede), which helps make the conceptual implications of the project more visible and accessible. Presenting groups of photographs focusing on each production site, the exhibition emphasizes the documentary, aesthetic, and conceptual components of this work. The Toronto version of the show includes thirty-two digitally printed large-format photographs (two more than the other venues), forty-eight Polaroid test prints, a series of twelve found Polaroids, an iPhone 2G with nineteen jpegs, and a six-minute montage of found YouTube footage. The main series of photographs is a beautifully composed and exquisitely printed set of images that present carefully constructed views of the exteriors and interiors of photographic manufacturing facilities and darkrooms, as well as images documenting the implosions of several production sites. The works are framed in large shadow boxes that give the images plenty of breathing room. The framing of the works plays with the viewer’s experience of scale: Burley presents exteriors at the same size as interiors creating a tension between the massive scale of many of the workspaces inside the manufacturing plants and the more human scale of the workstations and darkrooms.

As the exhibition makes clear with its photographs of empty factories, abandoned offices, and imploded buildings, analogue color photography as an industry has gone away. This restructuring of the photographic economy parallels the changes introduced at the end of the nineteenth century with the advent of Kodak. The introduction of simplified processes and roll film, among other changes, created a new market for photographic supplies and equipment, established a new field of amateur photographic practice, and transformed photography as an art form. Photography emerged in the twentieth century as a widespread pastime, not simply a field for professionals. It was the technologies and processes of this era that made darkness a central experience and concept for photography. These new technologies allowed photography to move away from the contact prints that dominated nineteenth-century production, to image enlargements in the early part of the twentieth century. This shift changed the darkroom from a dimly lit space to one that required near total darkness. Manufacturing these new, more light-sensitive materials required special facilities in which industrial processes could be carried out at a large scale in total darkness. Photography’s development into a ubiquitous pastime created the opportunity for mass production and allowed the building of infrastructures to support its economies of scale. Behind the “silver curtain,” using proprietary and patented formulas, Kodak and other manufacturers produced seemingly endless rolls of film in their windowless monoliths (Warehouse and Photo-Chemistry Building, Ilford, Mobberley, United Kingdom, 2010). These secretive processes were seldom represented, and one important aspect of the project is simply making images of these facilities available. Twentieth-century photographic production processes ceased to be economically viable without a large enough user base to generate consistent demand, and the exhibition shows the literal collapse of this system of production (Implosions of Building 65 and 69, Kodak Park, Rochester, New York, United States of America, 2007).

These two strands then, the literal darkness of photographic manufacturing and development, and the metaphorical darkness of patents and industrial secrets, are the darkness that has disappeared. What is at stake in trying to make their disappearance visible? The first is the literal darkness of the photographed darkrooms of practitioners and the lightfast buildings of the manufacturing process. There is also the metaphorical darkness of the proprietary formulas and industrial secrets that characterized the modern era of analogue/chemical photography in which the materials and processes were standardized, industrially mass produced, and sold in branded packaging. The exhibition also suggests that a darkness still remains: the conceptual darkness of the camera obscura, which preceded the industrial era and remains, in part, in the black boxing of digital photographic devices but has also been displaced in the merging of cameras, phones, and computers in contemporary consumer electronics.

It is in foregrounding this conceptual darkness that the other works in the exhibition take on additional importance. The unfixed test images of Faded Proof, a grid of forty-eight Polaroid Type 55 instant prints, emphasize the ephemerality of analogue photography. Photographs are not, despite our hopes and fears, permanent records. The images that were part of the workflow of the large-format images have a haunting sense of materiality given their fragility and fugitiveness. The Polaroids’ hexagonal format and lopsided margins combined with the slight curl of some of the works emphasize the physicality of photographs as objects, inviting us to look at the larger photographs nearby as objects as well and not simply as images. The nineteen jpegs of the slide show that make up Extermination Music Night XI at the Kodak Factory show an impromptu rave held at the only building left standing of Kodak Canada’s Toronto complex. (Extermination Music Night XI at the Kodak Factory. Got busted by the cops after the first song, May 31, 2009, slideshow of 19 JPEGs, displayed on an iPhone 2G [model discontinued 2010]. Photographs by Allan Cheng, AWMusic.ca.) The piece documents the aftermath of the site through the key tool of its abandonment. The iPhone’s ability to easily collate and share photographs was a breakthrough moment in the emergence of the new digital photograph practice in which photography left the camera (and film) behind and became a tool for social networking. Similarly, the montage of found footage shot by spectators of the various implosions of photographic production sites in 2007 both provides a digital record of the dematerialization of film and implies its changed relation to photographic circulation and authorship (Blow-ups, Looped video, 6 minutes 3 seconds, 2013). The static structures of analogue photographs are replaced by the fluid circulation of digital images.

The exhibition then, offers a complex meditation on the emerging digital present of photography. The two additional images in the Toronto version of the traveling exhibition are images of student darkrooms that were demolished as part of the Ryerson School of Image Arts renovations and replaced with the Ryerson Image Centre. These works suggest that the obsolescence of analogue photography has led to its erasure as a medium of production and its shift into a museum object to be curated and preserved. The photographs also, in being shot on film and printed digitally, suggest a seamlessness between the two eras in which the digital process becomes just another way of producing images. The two found digital works imply that the digital era will be characterized by a displacement of the fixity often associated with photographs into multiplicity, and a dispersion of photographic authorship and authority into the cloud. The exhibition captures an important shift in the production of photography while offering a nuanced view of its present and future.

—Matthew Brower