Editorial / Found Photography / Material Study
A book and image study made from discarded darkroom test strips, misprints, and chemical accidents collected from the Oberlin College darkroom trash.
2025
Book / Zine / Image Archive
MoMA PS1 Art Book Fair, 2025
Dark Room Trash began while I was cleaning out the Oberlin College darkroom. As I carried a small trash bin out of the darkroom and into the fluorescent light of the studio, discarded test strips and misprints began changing in front of me. Images that had been thrown away were still chemically active, still reacting, still becoming something.
I started collecting them. Some were barely recognizable as photographs anymore. Others held fragments of images, chemical stains, solarized edges, torn paper, and accidents from the developing process. I sorted them into binders, chose favorites, rearranged them, and began treating the discarded material as an archive.
The selection process was intuitive and curatorial. I was interested in the moments where accident, chemistry, and image-making became inseparable: places where the paper was falling apart, where the photograph was no longer fully legible, or where a mistake revealed something more compelling than the intended print.
With permission from the class, I transformed the collection into a curated book. The first edition was published by Crosstown Press in an edition of ten. Later, for the MoMA PS1 Art Book Fair, I made a smaller zine edition with Ben Burton and Introspect LA Press: a brief study in material, discard, ownership, and process.
The project moved through two forms. The first edition was glossy, magazine-like, and made in a small run of ten. The second edition was smaller and more direct: a zine-sized version made for the art book fair. Across both editions, the book became a way to hold unstable photographic material still long enough to look at it closely.
Making the work also became a way to understand the darkroom more closely: what stop and fix do, how images shift when the process breaks down, and how accidental exposure can change a print. The marks in the book are not decorative effects added later. They are records of chemistry, time, mishandling, light, and interruption.
The project sits between found photography and intentional authorship. I did not make the original exposures, but I did choose, preserve, sequence, and reframe them. What began as trash became a question about ownership, process, and whether curation itself can become a form of image-making.