Donna Cameron. Bibliophiles / La Seine, print 20"x24"

Silver Nitrate: Paris Circa 1984
– Donna Cameron –

May 1-25, 2025
Opening/Vernissage: Saturday, May 3, 2-4:00 pm

Andy Warhol once said "The best thing about a picture is that it never changes, even when the people in it do.” This is especially true of Paris, where the sense of style and individual idiosyncrasies seem always to be vintage and eternal. Go to Paris tomorrow and you may find the same divas and eccentrics that appear in this show. Here, in black and white, people and place, not landmarks, give meaning.

Images in which human hands reach out, arms embrace, a landmark monument meditatively awaits a cyclist's return: a camera shutter clicks, a film roll is wound forward – ordinary street theater is made timeless. Celluloid negatives are sculptural objects that hold a multi-sprocket hole surface layered with a fragile emulsion. They are to be handled respectfully. One can take a celluloid negative out over time and reconsider it. Reprint it, replay it, and a history ensues, a song.

I shot the silver nitrate photographs in this show in the mid-1980s, long before I made the photographic and filmic images that began to be collected by museums. The enigmatic encounters portrayed in this portfolio began in 1984, when I was a young artist, a stranger in Paris. I return to these celluloid dreams throughout every decade of my artistic practice and find new insights, always finding there is something special about the light in Paris.

The Technical View

Over the past four decades, my work has been noted for its creative use of light synth emulsions – paint, paper, alternative chemistries and silver nitrate photographic wash. Silver nitrate (AgNO3) is a colorless or white crystalline solid, used in photography as a light sensitive emulsion and medicine as a chemical intermediate. I have used AgNO3 emulsion as a photojournalist, a street photographer, a portraitist, a multimedia collagist, and a cinematic paper emulsion filmmaker. The poetry of silver nitrate imaging arrives time-sensitive, a message rolled in a tin capsule, to be opened and processed carefully. It is an integral part of my creative process, which is rooted in motion frame and sequence.

In the main gallery are analog silver nitrate negatives composed with my SLR Canon Ftb, a 35mm prime lens, tri-x and plus-x film, and various film developers, and printed on various types of fiber photo paper. With its imperfect swatch of rectangle, each negative is an ode to serendipity and survival. In the black box theater of the camera, at a decisive moment, inspiration captured a latent image as a potential soulmate scenario. In the darkroom photographer’s processing ritual, each frame is splayed and washed and, with a proof sheet’s printing, editorial choice, and an enlargement on print paper, a potential cinema is released. In every incarnation, a show’s audience completes the interactive drama, which is ongoing.

In the back gallery, to counterpoint, I have placed cinematic paper emulsion work that uses liquid silver nitrate brushed onto clear celluloid film, adds layered collected objects on the brushed surface in a dark room, exposes the assemblage with a film projector, and, since I process the exposed celluloid photograms myself, usher transmedia analog art into a digital environment, hand-colored and printed onto substrates, to create unique AgNO3 poems.

Browse works from Silver Nitrate: Paris Circa 1984