Fogged
During a six year period of managing a darkroom, I discovered a box of photographic paper that was marked ‘Old + Fogged’ while cleaning one of the dark, dusty, and rarely utilized cabinets of the darkroom facility. Why someone would take the time to label the fogged paper instead of disposing of it was amusing to me and I held onto the box. Years later, I rediscovered the box of paper in a storage tote in my studio. On a whim, I decided to test the paper and discovered that the fogging was not from someone opening the box and flooding the paper with disproportionate amounts of visible light like I had assumed. Instead, it was fogged evenly, a product of cosmic radiation. As NASA describes it in a study titled The Effect of Radiation on Select Photographic Film, the “high background levels of radiation” cause photographic fog because the paper is continually being subjected to non-visible wavelengths of light. “Fog occurs when photographic materials absorb uniform levels of energy that is part of an intended photographic exposure.” As someone with a family history of skin cancer, I often think about the potential and inevitable danger the sun poses to my skin, which was evidenced by this uniformly fogged paper that has never seen the light of day. I began to find ways of working with the evenly-fogged surface by using photographic developer and fixer to manipulate the surface and using only basic tools, gravity, and motion to create organic compositions.