While moving studios around eight years ago, some experiments with ink on film were filed away and forgotten about in the reshuffle. In 2020, I found them in a manila envelope and, curious to see them for the first time, sent them off to be scanned.
I got the scans back on March 15, 2020, a day after all NYC schools closed and alarming numbers of sick and dying began to roll in. I did not intentionally set out to make these images, so part of my fascination with this project has been with the strange alchemy of creativity itself—how something you begin years prior can sit patiently, like a seed, until the right moment.
For this series, I used antique photo retouching inks and old slides from my personal photo archive. These inks are traditionally used to erase flaws that occur in analog photography—to create a ‘perfect’ print. This process of dropping ink onto slides with a dropper is not unlike testing for pathogens on medical slides. The inks interact serendipitously with the landscape, as stains, blotches, floating vessels, imaginary interventions, each suggesting different relationships to the land; political, environmental, formal, and corporeal.
— Amanda Marchand
