Rebecca Najdowski
Rebecca Najdowski connects humans, the more than human world and the technology of photo media. Her works are beautiful, haunting and also ask critical questions about how we see the earth, how we represent the earth and how these affect our interactions with the earth and our impacts on it.
Her Surfacing project from 2017-2018 explored how the interactions of the environment directly onto analogue photographic media could create a different way of engaging with landscapes. Even without knowing the context and the methodologies, the work is striking and I am left asking ‘what happened here?’ With the context I am drawn deeper into a mind maze of extradimensionality. These images directly show me dimensions of understanding that transcend the traditional photo media portrayal of nature, but also peer back into deeper time and into geochemical processes.
For Surfacing (gelatine silver) she exposed expired photography paper directly to geothermal steam vents and geysers. This created ‘images’ in the silver gelatine emulsion that were the result of not only UV light, but chemical reactions between the emulsion and the chemicals emitted by the earth.
Rebecca Najdowski - Surfacing (gelatine-silver), 2017-2018
In Surfacing (chromogenic) she submerged chromogenic photographic film into lakes filled with saline water, complete with algae and bacteria for months. Over time the lake water impacted the emulsion through forming of salt crystals as well as breaking down the emulsion itself. These open a door to a longer process than the ‘photographic moment’ and create a record of the films’ time in the lake
Rebecca Najdowski, Surfacing (chromagenic), 2017-2018
