The description “locally sourced, plant-based ingredients” conjures images of delicious veg-friendly cuisine. But for Alice Cazenave, a photo artist and doctoral researcher, it’s a means of reinventing film photography and centering ecology in the process.
Cazenave is an adviser to The Sustainable Darkroom, a charity which aims to promote methods of developing film with low-toxicity photo chemistries. Film photography requires the use of heavy metals both in the photo paper itself (silver) and the solutions needed to make the image bloom.
But in Cazenave’s world, dandelions and nettles can be boiled to make the same solutions. A stroll along a river or through a fresh-cut lawn yields a handful of useful materials for developing film.
“What I love about working this way is that the focus shifts massively from the final photograph, and it shifts towards the process of finding materials and trying things out together,” Cazenave said during a talk with Visual Studies Workshop in November 2024.
As part of her research with Goldsmiths University of London, Cazenave came to Rochester from the United Kingdom in 2024 to better understand Kodak’s role in spreading those processes — and in the local ecological devastation that resulted. Her work exists at the crossroads of, as she has described, “film photography, settler colonialism and ecological violence.”
Plant-based chemistry, she said in that talk, “destabilizes understandings of what a good photograph is, or what the correct way to make a photograph is.” Instead, there is a new attention given to the natural materials gathered and used during each step of the process.
Cazenave’s dedicated time in Rochester from February 2024 through the summer made a mark. Rochester Institute of Technology hosted her as a visiting scholar for its Art and Sustainability series in 2024, where she walked students through how to make plant-based solutions and even cultivate their own gardens for photo materials.
“You can go out, literally grab some plants out of the garden and develop your photos and not even have it be kind of funky,” said Joshua Thorson, director of RIT’s MFA program in photography and related media, who helped arrange the sessions. “It more or less looks normal if you’re using regular photo paper.”
Thorson said the concept of plant-based photo chemistry goes hand-in-hand with a renewed interest in analog photography he sees among his students.
“I think the consciousness of younger students is that they want to try to be accountable to these things and at the very least know what they’re using, not just taking it for granted,” he said.
Cazenave’s attention on the natural world led to a unique photo walk with members of The Lilac Collective, a local group connecting women and queer creatives. Five photographers hiked down to the Genesee River on a warm day in June, passing around a camera loaded with black and white film.
They collected plants as they moved along the trail, and Cazenave eventually used a portable hot plate to boil them into a solution with river water. Jen Carlson, a co-founder of The Lilac Collective, brought a bag as a makeshift darkroom.
“We were skipping rocks in the river. It was a whole experience of nature,” Carlson said. “We just happened to be doing a chemical process without the chemicals.”
It fit squarely into Cazenave’s emerging work in Rochester. In a series titled “Red. Lined.,” she captured images of her bicycle commute from the leafy greens of East Avenue, where she stayed, to the starker northern parts of the city characterized by Kodak’s industrial footprint.
Other processes were more metaphorical. As Cazenave experimented with how to visualize the toxicity in the photos themselves, she shook dirt and grit from local highways into film emulsions depicting Kodak landmarks, signifying the company’s well-documented history of pollution.
She used water from the Genesee, contaminated with silver, to distort a picture of the High Falls neighborhood with Kodak Tower prominently centered. It presented her with a unique challenge, as she mentioned during her VSW talk: “How do you speak about toxicity through a medium that is inherently toxic?”
Another work provided a commentary on the region’s colonial history. Cazenave’s research brought her to photographer Kalen Fontenelle, whom she asked to photograph white corn, a culturally important crop to the Haudenosaunee.
Fontenelle’s black and white image shows braids of corn hanging vertically, with one illuminated in sunlight. White corn is often prepared with culinary lye, which helps the kernels soften and is useful for photo chemistry as well. Cazenave used that solution to develop the photo.
“We definitely weren’t taking corn and wasting it,” she said in the VSW talk. “This was a way to give it another life.”
The work, which Fontenelle titled “a:yetíya’ dágeha’ [We Should Help Her],” centers the need to protect the earth in spite of continued harm done by humans.
“It’s a moving piece,” Fontenelle said. “It definitely seems like the beginning of a movement. People are starting to think about the earth as something we should take care of. The first step is always the hardest. I think Alice is a great person to be taking that first step.”
Her other local collaborators agree. Thorson said the RIT photo garden, full of heavy-metal remediating plants, will provide material for continued sustainable photo practices.
For Carlson, Cazenave’s knowledge was second only to her companionship.
“Everyone here who met Alice that I’ve talked to just loves her and misses her,” she said. “She really made an impact on all of us.” alice.cazenave.co.uk
Patrick Hosken is CITY’s arts reporter. He can be reached at patrick@rochester-citynews.com.
This article appears in Dec 1-31, 2024.
