Alison Rossiter produces camera-less imagery by developing expired unexposed photographic paper in darkroom chemistry. Over the years, she has amassed an extensive collection of nineteenth and twentieth century papers from a dwindling supply of a once-plentiful commodity. Rossiter holds a reverence for these antiquated materials, and her practice provides a means of revitalization.
While some of Rossiter’s prints are made by immersing an entire sheet into chemistry, the present lot shows her ‘pooling’ technique, in which she selectively dips the paper into developer or, alternatively, pours the chemistry directly onto the sheet. In the present work, the amorphous forms are neither entirely aligned nor symmetrical due to the unpredictable nature of the chemistry. The result is an elegant, serendipitous composition of form and tonality – an entirely new type of photographic image built upon the foundation of the past.
