Acts of No Coming and No Going
reflecting sustainable photography
A series of photographic learnings using alternative and plant-based processes. The project engages family archives and personal documentation of ephemeral gestures and moments, applying experimental darkroom techniques.
Materials include plant-based emulsions used as photographic developers and printing mediums. Each process is chosen for its ecological and political implications, questioning photography's extractive (chemical) history.
The work investigates how images can be negotiated rather than taken — where the act of printing becomes an engagement with material, memory, and lineage. Each print is unique, shaped by the organic properties of plant matter and the specificity of individual exposure.
Currently in development as an ongoing research project exploring the intersection of photographic impermanence, ecological practice, and diasporic memory.
On Negotiation and Care
Materials hold history. The chemical that makes the image also carries extraction, colonialism, violence. To choose plant-based processes is to ask: who pays? To refuse convenience in favor of slowness, in favor of what grows.
In the darkroom, my hands learn something the mind alone cannot. The beetroot print teaches: blur and clarity can exist at once. Past and present in a single image. My great-grandmother's face, my hands, this moment—all folded into the paper.
This is not documentation. This is tending. An act of caring for what cannot be explained, only lived.
Memory does not fade. It changes color. It becomes visible in the materials we choose.