Food Chemistry

Darkroom photography is a completely physical process that uses a series of chemical reactions to record images on film, and transfer those images to a piece of paper. Complex chemical reactions like this happen everywhere all the time. They are even happening inside us with everything our bodies intake, these reactions allow our bodies to function.

Most people think chemicals are bad for our body, they’re scary things made in a lab that we need to avoid. Literally everything is chemicals. Of course, many chemicals are indeed bad for us, PFAS and lead immediately come to mind. But chemicals also are the things keeping us alive every second. We are all made of chemicals, we eat chemicals, take in all kinds of chemicals with every breath. To me, that’s not a scary concept.

Seeing this, I decided to use the visual representation of chemical changes that is darkroom photography to see what distorting effects the things we consume on a daily basis have on an image. They were shot on 4x5 and printed on fiber paper. To get this distortion the consumable in each photo was “soaked” into the paper anywhere from 12 seconds to 12 hours.

To get these prints to the desired level of distortion, a good deal of experimentation was required for each print. Figuring out the strength a given food has to mess up a print was usually the most difficult part. It might only need a minute before the image is completely destroyed, or it might need a day to have any impact at all. Of course, I wouldn’t know until I developed the print whether the image was gone or not.

Interestingly, many different consumables would destroy the print, but without any color change or textural effect. Some of these were still cool enough to keep, but what I found most visually striking in this project was the more visually loud prints. This is why there aren’t any healthy foods in the project, the dyes and such in processed junk food gave the best looking effects.