In 2018, Jennifer Garza-Cuen and Odette England spent a week at the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation Residency in Captiva, Florida, where they made nearly two hundred photograms in Rauschenberg’s own swimming pool. Their light-sensitive material was expired 1970s gelatin silver paper discovered in his darkroom. They pierced and slashed its bags and envelopes with pens, scissors and knives, folded sheets at odd angles, or layered several inside one another. Some sank; others floated near the filtration units. Exposures ran overnight and through the day, so sunlight, moonlight and water acted on the paper at varying intensities.
Past Paper // Present Marks: Responding to Rauschenberg, published by Radius Books, gathers that collaboration. The book presents the work of two photographers rather than a single author’s vision, and its title states its method plainly: an old photographic support is reactivated, and the marks of that reactivation become the image. What results is not documentation of a place but a record of conditions, chance and physical handling, made with materials that already belonged to another artist’s working life.
The project sits at a productive distance from conventional tribute. Garza-Cuen and England do not photograph Rauschenberg’s objects; they use his paper, pool and residue of a practice as active agents in their own. The expired paper and the uncontrolled environment of water and weather introduce failures and accidents that no one fully directs, which places the series in a lineage of process-based photographic practice while keeping its references specific. Rauschenberg’s own engagement with photography, present across his work yet rarely foregrounded, gives the undertaking additional point.
For collectors, the appeal lies in the coherence of concept and object. Radius Books has issued the series as a 160-page hardcover with 70 images and texts by Susan Bright, David Campany and Nicholas Muellner, writers whose participation frames the pictures rather than merely introducing them. A book that documents a residency, a material inheritance and a two-person method in one volume holds a distinct place on a shelf of postwar and contemporary photography books, and the accompanying limited edition signals that the publisher treats the project as a body of work worth sustained attention.
