The Picton Reading Room, Liverpool City Library2008
Poised between the evocation of nostalgia and an awareness of the uncanny in the contemporary world, my work draws our attention to the fragility of the temporal and physical spaces we share with others. It has been described as both mournfully beautiful and ambiguous in timeframe. Entirely monochromatic, the work meditates on the conjunction of histories, when one historical moment is about to be displaced by another. In the context of film photography, I enact this not only in the subjects I document but in the materiality of the work itself; I use traditional darkroom techniques photographing on film and printing by hand. The series title is drawn from a 1997 publication by neurologist Oliver Sacks, who encountered a community of Pacific islanders born colour blind.
Gelatin silver prints are black-and-white photographic prints that have been created using papers coated with an emulsion of gelatin and light-sensitive silver salts. After the papers are briefly exposed to light (usually through a negative), a chemical developer renders the latent image as reduced silver, which is then fixed and washed. This technique was first introduced in the 1870s and is still used today. Most twentieth-century black-and-white photographs are gelatin silver prints. They are known for being highly detailed and sharply defined prints with a distinguishable smooth, even image surface.
