No Words – The Darkroom as Shelter
When Russia invaded Ukraine, I went to my basement and started making one photograph every day. For a year.
365 Days in the Darkroom
Thursday, February 24, 2022 – Thursday, February 23, 2023
A daily photographic ritual.
This project is dedicated to those who have overcome fear, freed their minds, and stood up to the autocrats, liars, and despots of this world. In a sparsely furnished basement darkroom, I began endlessly exposing the same motif on old photographic paper. Each day, I count the days and paint the numbers with a brush soaked in fixer onto the exposed but undeveloped paper – a continuous, ritualistic act.
Like a shaman, I dispel all shame, helplessness, and hatred through this ritual photographic process of repeatedly exposing the same negative: women’s hands holding a blank sheet of paper. A gesture of protest, a symbol for all acts of resistance. Sometimes, during development, I expose the papers to white light, producing the effect of solarization.
The positive becomes the negative.
The images are only briefly washed, but not fully fixed.
Thus begins the process of “destruction” immediately after the photograph is made. Under the influence of light, each image changes over the years—permanently, randomly, and irreversibly. The scans of the individual works (below on this page) capture the state of the photographs immediately after their creation.
(No Words — The Darkroom as Shelter)
See how the project takes on new meanings in different exhibition contexts.
(Darkroom as Shelter, Ritual, and Salvation: Three Concepts Manifesting Differently Across Exhibition Contexts)
No Words” was shortlisted for the Felix Schoeller Photo Award in the category “German Peace Prize for Photography” in 2023.
Exhibition view, 2023. 365 unfixed contact prints ranging in size from 13 x 18 cm to 18 x 24 cm. Total size approximately 250 cm x 400 cm.
