Rachelle Bussières on Camera-Less Luminograms and the Chemistry of Silver Gelatin

In a My Modern Met interview, French-Canadian artist Rachelle Bussières describes turning her Brooklyn studio into a combined camera obscura, darkroom, and presentation space, where mural-size sheets of black-and-white silver gelatin paper are rolled, folded, pinned, and masked before exposure to handlights and window light. Exposure times range from seconds to days or weeks, and the final imprint only appears once the paper enters the fixing bath. Bussières, who began as a photojournalist and made handmade paper from natural fibers while living on a cliffside in Northern California, first encountered a darkroom in grad school and moved from chemigrams and solarization to dispensing with the camera altogether. Her blues, violets, pinks, and warm beiges arise from silver particles oxidizing and losing light sensitivity, not from applied pigment. Works cited include "Ciels (Printemps 2025)" (2025), "Sky Prints (Wild Fires)" (2023), "Air Print (10 days)" (2026), and several "Light's Measure" pieces from 2026, alongside an installation view at Bigaignon, Paris, from 2025. She credits Jean-Luc Marion's "The Crossing of the Visible" with shaping her view of vision as an act of receiving, and says she now reads everyday light—over the East River at dusk, across a wall in winter—as something that acts rather than simply is. She keeps her walls bare between sessions to start fresh, and hopes viewers feel awe before curiosity.