In Compendium 1898–1919, Alison Rossiter works with photographic paper that has outlived its purpose. Using sheets whose expiration dates span the turn of the twentieth century, she develops the material without exposing it to a camera image, allowing age, moisture, mold, and physical damage to register as tone. The results are abstract fields whose colors and gradations are traces of storage and time rather than depictions of anything in the world. The project is conceived as a chronology of twelve assemblages, keyed to the years named in the title.
The book’s lineage runs back to Anna Atkins, whose nineteenth-century volumes were the first to be illustrated with photographs. Rossiter’s tribute is material rather than stylistic: she treats expired paper as a record of its own history. Even after decades dormant, the light-sensitive stock still responds to chemical development, and she counts the damage itself as subject matter. By positioning each sheet on a timeline, the series sets private photographic matter beside public events, with the reference dates included as a key at the back of the book.
Radius Books co-published the volume with the New York Public Library and Yossi Milo. The book reproduces all twelve works at actual scale, so the reader encounters the assemblages at the size Rossiter made them, and close-up details photographed by Peter Riesett, head photographer in the library’s digital imaging unit, make visible the surface effects that carry the work’s meaning. The 96-page hardcover, with 36 images, presents this small, precisely delimited series with unusual care.
For collectors of contemporary photography, the appeal lies in the clarity of the proposition. Rossiter’s practice sits at the meeting point of darkroom process, abstraction, and archival memory, and this volume documents a complete, self-defined sequence rather than a survey. The actual-scale plates and the reference key make the chronology legible, while the collaboration with the New York Public Library lends the publication an institutional frame. It is a book about what photographic materials remember, and it is built to let that question be examined closely.
