Bear in mind what you’re reading here is the tombstone (2025)

Analog positives on expired orthochromatic black-and-white film with silver mirroring effect

50 x 80 cm

In her ongoing MA thesis project Bear in mind what you’re reading here is the tombstone, that was presented in Photon Gallery, the artist uses photographic material as a tool for measuring time. Photographs, like any physical medium, are not fixed at the moment of their creation—they slowly age and decay. This decay always leaves traces on the medium, one of which is the silver mirroring effect. Characteristic of the decomposition of black-and-white photographs, silver mirroring occurs when silver particles migrate to the surface of the material and create a silvery shimmer. This effect, which photographers and conservators usually try to prevent or remove, is deliberately triggered by the artist.

The aesthetics of decay become part of the image, distancing the viewer from the moment of its creation and presenting it as the past—a past that never truly existed as it appears in the photographic image. The choice to imitate the natural traces of years of decay through an artificially created silver mirroring effect is itself a departure from the original. The desperate gesture of reproducing the past thus leads to the creation of something new, something inaccessible.

The series presents simple motifs from the artist’s personal archive, transformed in the darkroom into large-format positives on expired graphic film with an artificially induced silver mirroring effect. These are accompanied by a smaller 35 mm negative from the artist's archive, where she first observed the naturally occurring silver mirroring effect that developed during storage—a catalyst for the project.