Alison Rossiter has been making photographs since 1970, but the works gathered in Expired Paper dispense with camera, lens, and film alike. Her material is photographic paper recovered decades after its manufacture, its chemistry long since destabilized by age, moisture, and stray light. By subjecting these sheets to developer, she coaxes images from deterioration itself, so that the paper’s own compromised condition becomes both subject and instrument. The results belong to abstraction, yet they carry the physical memory of a manufactured object: an Eastman Kodak Azo expiration date, a batch stamp, a faint bloom of chemical fatigue.
The book, published by Radius Books in collaboration with Yossi Milo Gallery, organizes that practice into sections reflecting its range—among them Latent, Landscapes, Pools, Pours, Dips, Blurs, Fours, and Collages. The grouping matters because Rossiter’s work is not one procedure repeated but a family of approaches to a single question: what a sheet of expired paper will do when coaxed into visibility. The art critic Leah Ollman contributes an essay, placing the images in a lineage where the photograph is treated less as a window onto the world than as an object with its own idiosyncratic history.
A separate booklet reproduces early twentieth-century photographic paper packages, drawn from a collection the artist has assembled over more than a decade. Those wrappers and labels are not marginalia. They identify the stocks and eras from which the pictures came, and they make plain how much of the project concerns the manufacture, distribution, and decay of a material once treated as merely instrumental. In a photograph made without a camera, the packaging may be the closest thing to a document.
The volume’s scale—196 pages, ninety images, hardcover—suits work whose subtleties are often tonal and whose subject is frequently a slight variation in surface, tone, or chemical marking. For a collector drawn to postwar and contemporary photography that interrogates the medium from within, Expired Paper offers both an extended survey and a careful account of materials that most histories of the field leave unexamined. It is, in the most literal sense, a book about what photographic paper remembers.
