Yellow Darkroom

YELLOW DARKROOM shifts the focus of photography from the visual reproduction of the world to contemporary tools of image-production and the physical conditions of the medium itself. Although, the viewer might be tempted to believe that in the digital age photography has lost its material foundation, the binary image cannot exist without hardware. “Red Darkrooms” of the analogue era in photography got substantially updated in form of “Yellow Darkrooms”, in which modern electronic devices are assembled. Under the yellow safelight of industrial scale cleanrooms, printed circuit boards, microchips and even sensors for digital cameras are produced by engineers deploying sophisticated photo(litho)graphic processes. Therefore copper-laminated plates serving as carriers for electronic components are lit and developed in a photochemical process before the copper-layer is partially etched to create conductive paths. For YELLOW DARKROOM the industrial process is translated into the context of the art world, where it doesn’t serve functional purposes but is embedded in an aesthetic canon. The use of high-tech material in combination with experimental manual processing not only leads to extremely precise etching results through which a hyperreal look is obtained but also allows a variety of surface refinements. The imagery explores the topics of nature and technique on an equal level and spans from binary water surface reflections during sunset to grids revealing the structural code of photoshop tools when used to distort rather than to heal photographic material. The body of work furthermore reflects on the historical foundations of photography via contemporary appropriations of classic photograms of ferns (Atkins) and fabrics (Talbot).