This series visually communicates my personal journey through the clinical, sterile IVF treatments and the physical and mental pain of this process. In the lab, embryos are counted, graded and numbered like samples. They’re stored frozen together in the dark and quiet room like icy poles in the corner shop at night. In every embryo transfer, the “baby” was thawed and simply slid down the tube into my uterus. This would be it, they’d say. Throughout the fertility treatments, I just obsessively continued to swallow my defrosted embryos. The aim of the journey became obscure. Mindlessly and compulsively, I consumed the embryos like bitterly cold icy poles. It became so painful that I just wanted it to be over.
Chromogenic prints are printed on paper that has at least three emulsion layers containing invisible dyes and silver salts. Each emulsion layer is sensitive to a different primary colour of light (red, green or blue). The development process converts the hidden dyes to visible colour depending on the amount of light it was exposed to. This type of paper is commonly used to print from colour negatives or digital files to produce a full-colour image. It can also be used to print black-and-white images, giving softer grain and less contrast than gelatin silver prints. Commonly known as c-type prints, chromogenic processing was developed in the 1940s and widely used for colour printing, including for domestic snapshots. While recent years have seen this process accompanied by ink-jet and digital printing technologies, chromogenic printing still remains in use to this day.
