Almost Gone

Almost Gone imagines a world about 500 years in the future, a world that has survived a dystopian climate catastrophe called the pyrocene, beginning in the year 2024. The whole of society was destroyed in this time, and these photographs, which were buried in a time capsule, are all that remain from our time. This project was shot on color film all around the midwestern United States. Each roll was distressed by being boiled in a “film soup”

In this world, the rebuilding of society is still very much in progress. The images are used in academic settings, studied thoroughly, but also presented for the public as more of a curiosity, a historical spectacle of the long lost society. That public facing perspective is the format this project is presented in. Captions below each image attempt (with only some success) to decipher and contextualize each photo for this general audience. A story card is given with the images to give further context to these future viewers.

I found it particularly worthwhile meditating on the idea that our entire society will one day be a forgotten blip in history. The way our society is globally interconnected and is always growing, becoming more complex everyday, it feels so permanent in the moment. We’ve built something here, generation after generation. Our society has expanded this whole capitalism thing as far as we possibly could, often through incredibly inhuman and tragic means. Though just like all economic systems and societies before ours, it’ll all just go away one day. This perspective helped me get in the right mindset to take these photos. I constantly asked myself, what things would I want to show off from this world, if it were all going away tomorrow?

The effect you see on each image is a chemical and physical reaction that I impart on the film. After shooting, each roll is exposed to extreme acidity and temperature for anywhere from 45 minutes to 2 hours. This is done by boiling in a (frankly disgusting) mixture of all sorts of chemicals.

This “film soup,” as it’s been dubbed, began with just some red wine and lemon juice, but I reused it and added new stuff after each boiling so the mixture got much more complicated by the last roll. Pasta sauce, vodka, beer, every spice in my cabinet, coffee, salt, and motor oil to name a few.

It smelled… just absolutely rancid, like death even. No question I had to do it outside on a propane burner.

Learn more about the process here