The Materiality of Photography with Pablo Larios, Dionne Lee, Michelle Henning, and Aspen Mays

Why It Matters

Understanding photography’s material and chemical histories reveals hidden colonial and environmental impacts, guiding artists and institutions toward more sustainable, ethically aware image‑making practices.

Key Takeaways

• Artists explore photography’s chemical roots amid AI digitization surge
• Analog processes face lab closures, prompting alternative material experiments
• Indigo-dyed prints link personal heritage to colonial extraction histories
• Fog’s pollution historically altered photographic emulsions, revealing hidden narratives
• “Dirty History of Photography” uncovers empire‑driven chemical industry impacts

Summary

The panel titled “The Materiality of Photography” convened at Paroto, featuring Art Forum editor Pablo Larios and artists Dion Lee, Michelle Henning, and Aspen Mays. Their discussion framed photography not as a purely visual medium but as a chemical practice embedded in histories of extraction, labor, and environmental impact, especially as AI and digital workflows dominate contemporary discourse.

The speakers highlighted how the decline of traditional dark‑room labs threatens analog techniques, prompting a resurgence of alternative processes—expired film, cyanotypes, indigo‑dyeing, and fossil‑like stone prints. They connected these material experiments to broader concerns about sustainability, the toxic legacies of photographic chemicals, and the ways in which scientific knowledge shapes artistic practice.

Concrete examples illustrated these themes: Dion Lee’s stone‑and‑cyanotype works envision a non‑human landscape that photographs itself; Aspen Mays dyed a silver gelatin print with indigo derived from her great‑grandmother’s textiles, invoking the colonial history of indigo production; Michelle Henning’s forthcoming "A Dirty History of Photography" traces Ilford’s fog‑induced emulsion failures and the intertwined narratives of industrial pollution and empire.

Collectively, the dialogue underscores a pressing need for the photographic community to reckon with material provenance, archival stability, and the political ecology of image‑making. By foregrounding chemistry and extraction, the panel suggests new pathways for sustainable, historically informed practice in an era increasingly dominated by digital and AI technologies.

Original Description

In November 2025, during Paris Photo, Artforum convened two conversations on the materiality of photography at the Grand Palais.

Here, artist Dionne Lee, art historian Michelle Henning, and artist Aspen Mays discuss the infrastructures behind the image—mining, fog, and the chemical foundations of photography—in a discussion moderated by Artforum's Pablo Larios. At a moment when photographic processes are evolving and the medium’s technical knowledge experiences a generational shift, the photograph comes into view as an artifact tied to industry, labor, and colonial histories.

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