A new book of photography by Toronto artist
Robert Burley, called
Disappearance of Darkness, is receiving warm reviews in the UK.
"There have been various valedictory photographic essays about the passing of analogue photography over the past decade, but none quite as extensive as Robert Burley's 10-year project to chronicle the disappearance of the sites where film was produced and developed," writes the
Observer's Sean O'Hagan. "No doubt digital technology will record and define this century just as analogue photography did the last. What will disappear, though, is the physical manifestation of the photographic process, not just the print, but the negative, the contact sheet, and, with it, a certain process of often painstaking creativity and chemical transformation."
Losing the places that processed film commercially also creates a hole in cities like Toronto.
"What is striking about his images of the Kodak Canada plant in Toronto, where he lives, for instance, is the futuristic anonymity of the building, both inside and out. In a pristine administrative area, an employee's fleece hangs on a slim pillar like a flag of defeat, while the absence of human activity is almost palpable. The exception is one large-scale photograph, taken from above, in which he captures a spread of small figures leaving the car park after an employee meeting that took place during the last few days of production."
Read the full story
here
Original source: The Observer