Photo Products Department
2020Custom lightboxes, digital prints on Duratrans, gear motors, electronics, film reels, 16mm film
The framed images are all appropriated from DuPont's visual archive -- staged, theatricized photos of workers at the company's film laboratories in Parlin, New Jersey. Two motorized 16mm film reels very slowly draw 400ft of film across a central lightbox, showing thousands of X-ray images of internal organs. Invoking the lightbox's double function as artistic and medical device, the work invites the viewer to move in close and peer through the film strip, thereby mirroring the surrounding mosaic of DuPont actors and their ostentatious play of gazes.
Behind the sensory technologies and capitalized aesthetic products of film and photography, the visualized, compromised human body is framed here as a spectral horizon. Just as filmic and photographic technologies extend the body's phenomenological capacities, seeing in slow motion or through spectra the senses cannot access, and extending the imagined possibilities of aesthetic expression, these technologies are supported by a material back-end equally impactful on the porous bodies of workers and civilians, whose livelihoods are jeopardized by the dangerous chemicals and military research so fundamental to the production processes.
Residents of Parlin, NJ, the town surrounding DuPont's old photo products plants (pictured above), are seeking a Superfund classification for the area under the EPA, citing the extreme groundwater contamination and high cancer rates resulting from DuPont's decades of unregulated dumping.
