17.5: Slow Light- The Return of Photographic Materiality

As photography became faster, smoother, and more immaterial in the twenty-first century, many artists turned back toward older, slower, and more physically demanding processes. This return was not nostalgic in any simple sense. It was not merely a longing for film, darkrooms, or the romance of pre-digital craft. Instead, historical and alternative processes became contemporary tools for thinking about memory, labor, time, death, ecology, and material presence.

The revival of analog and alternative processes is therefore not a rejection of the twenty-first century. It is one of the ways artists respond to it. In a culture of instant images, slow photographic processes make time visible again. In a culture of endless digital copies, handmade photographic objects reassert uniqueness, touch, vulnerability, and duration. They remind viewers that photographs are not only images. They are also physical events made through contact, exposure, chemistry, surface, weather, accident, and decay.

This return to materiality matters because digital photography often hides its own physical conditions. A photograph on a screen may feel weightless, but it depends on servers, storage systems, rare earth minerals, electrical grids, software updates, camera sensors, and corporate platforms. Digital images seem immaterial because their materiality has been displaced into systems that are mostly invisible to the viewer. Alternative photographic processes bring material conditions back into view. They ask us to notice what an image is made of, how long it took to appear, what it might lose over time, and what kind of body or surface carries it.

Binh Danh’s work offers one of the most compelling examples of this return to photographic materiality. Danh, a Vietnamese American artist born in Vietnam in 1977, is known for using alternative photographic processes to explore history, memory, war, landscape, and national identity. The National Gallery of Art describes his work as an investigation into “the relationship between history, memory, and the landscape,” especially through the Vietnam-American War, Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge regime, and American national parks.¹ His practice is especially important because he does not use historical or experimental processes as decorative effects. In his work, process carries meaning.

Danh is best known for his chlorophyll prints, a process in which photographic images are embedded into leaves through photosynthesis. To make these works, Danh places a photographic transparency over a living leaf, sandwiches the leaf and transparency between a solid surface and glass, and exposes the arrangement to sunlight. The image gradually forms through the plant’s own reaction to light. The American Academy in Rome describes this as a chemical-free photographic process generated through photosynthesis.² The result is a photograph that is not printed on paper, but held within the organic surface of a leaf.

This process profoundly changes the viewer’s understanding of photography. The leaf is not simply a support for the image. It is part of the image’s meaning. It is both photographic surface and living matter, both archive and organism. Unlike a conventional print, which may appear stable and complete, Danh’s chlorophyll prints emphasize fragility. They are vulnerable to light, air, handling, and time. The same force that creates the image can also endanger it. In this sense, the work makes visible one of photography’s oldest tensions: the desire to preserve what is already passing away.

Danh’s process also recalls the earliest histories of photography, when experimenters studied how light could alter chemically sensitive surfaces. Yet his work does not simply imitate nineteenth-century invention. It transforms photographic history into a contemporary language of remembrance. Instead of silver salts, glass plates, or industrially manufactured papers, Danh uses leaves. Instead of treating nature as something photographed from a distance, he makes nature an active collaborator in the image-making process. Sunlight does not merely illuminate the subject. It helps produce the photograph through the living chemistry of the plant.

The significance of this method becomes especially powerful in Danh’s series Immortality: The Remnants of the Vietnam and American War. In these works, he printed images associated with the Vietnam War onto leaves and grasses, often using source material drawn from history books and magazines.³ The images carry the visual memory of war, but they appear within organic matter that suggests growth, decay, burial, and regeneration. The leaf becomes a site where historical violence and natural cycles meet.

This relationship between war and organic material is central to the emotional force of the work. The Vietnam War was not only fought between armies. It was fought across landscapes, villages, forests, fields, bodies, and memories. Chemical defoliants, bombing campaigns, refugee displacement, and the long aftermath of violence transformed both land and people. By embedding war images into leaves, Danh refuses to separate historical memory from the environment that carries its traces. The landscape is not a neutral background. It is a witness.

Danh’s biography also matters, though the work should not be reduced to biography alone. He immigrated to the United States as a child refugee from Vietnam, and the war’s legacy forms part of his inherited history. In an interview with Time, Danh described photography as a way to connect with a painful family and national past, especially when that past was difficult for his parents to discuss directly.⁴ His work therefore moves between personal memory and collective memory. It asks how later generations inherit events they did not fully experience but nevertheless carry.

The chlorophyll print becomes an ideal form for this question. A leaf carries traces of light. It records exposure. It changes over time. It can be preserved only imperfectly. These qualities parallel the instability of memory itself. Memory is not a fixed archive stored without alteration. It fades, returns, mutates, and attaches itself to objects, places, and images. Danh’s leaves suggest that memory is alive, but also vulnerable. It must be protected, but it cannot be made permanent in any absolute sense.

This is why the title Immortality is so complex. On one level, photography has often been linked to a desire for immortality: the ability to preserve a face, event, or moment after it has disappeared. Yet Danh’s chlorophyll prints refuse the illusion of perfect preservation. They are fragile images of death and survival made through living matter. Their “immortality” is uncertain, dependent, and partial. The works suggest that remembrance is not the same as permanence. To remember is not to stop time, but to remain in relationship with what time threatens to erase.

Danh often preserves his chlorophyll prints in resin, a method that gives the delicate leaf a more durable form. This act of preservation adds another layer of meaning. The resin protects the image, but it also turns the leaf into an artifact, almost like a specimen or relic. The viewer becomes aware that the object has been rescued from disappearance, but not returned to life. The work therefore holds together preservation and loss. It keeps memory visible while acknowledging that memory is always under pressure.

In a digitally saturated age, this slowness has particular force. A smartphone photograph may be made and shared in seconds. Danh’s chlorophyll prints require exposure, waiting, material sensitivity, and uncertainty. The process cannot be fully rushed or completely controlled. Weather, light, plant matter, and time all participate. This makes the work resistant to the logic of instant image culture. It asks viewers to think about how long an image takes to become meaningful.

The slowness of Danh’s process is not only technical. It is ethical. Images of war often circulate quickly and violently. They can shock, persuade, desensitize, or become detached from the people and histories they represent. Danh slows the war image down by placing it into a fragile organic body. The viewer is not simply confronted with documentary evidence. Instead, the image appears as something that must be approached carefully. It asks for attention rather than consumption.

Danh’s work also complicates the archive. Many of his source images come from existing photographic records of war, including history books and magazines. These images already belong to systems of public memory. By transferring them to leaves, Danh changes their status. They are no longer only journalistic or historical documents. They become meditations on how images survive, how nations remember, and how trauma is absorbed into both bodies and landscapes. The archive is not abandoned, but transformed through material process.

This transformation places Danh within a broader revival of alternative processes among contemporary photographers. Artists such as Sally Mann, Adam Fuss, Susan Derges, Chris McCaw, Meghann Riepenhoff, Matthew Brandt, and Takashi Arai have used historical or experimental methods to reconsider the physical conditions of photography. These artists often work with wet plate collodion, photograms, cyanotypes, sunburned paper, chemical instability, or daguerreotypes. Their work suggests that older processes remain useful not because they are quaint, but because they carry ideas that digital photography often suppresses: labor, accident, touch, exposure, and mortality.

Danh’s contribution to this field is distinctive because his process brings photography into direct contact with botanical life. The photograph is not simply made by light; it is made through a living organism’s response to light. This creates a powerful link between image-making and ecology. The work reminds us that light is not only a photographic tool. It is also a biological force. Plants convert light into life. Danh converts that process into memory.

The ecological dimension of the work should not be separated from its historical dimension. The leaf suggests nature, but it also suggests vulnerability. It can be bruised, dried, buried, preserved, or destroyed. When war imagery appears on this surface, the viewer is asked to consider how violence marks the natural world as well as human bodies. The land remembers, even when official histories move on.

In this way, Danh’s work offers a crucial counterpoint within a chapter on twenty-first-century photography. Earlier sections may emphasize speed, circulation, social media, algorithms, and the networked image. Danh’s chlorophyll prints ask what happens when photography slows down enough to become material again. They do not deny contemporary image culture. They answer it. Against the endless reproducibility of digital files, they offer vulnerable objects. Against instant circulation, they offer duration. Against the illusion that images float free from matter, they return photography to light, surface, touch, and decay.

The importance of Binh Danh’s work, then, is not that it revives an older idea of photography. It expands what photography can mean in the present. His chlorophyll prints show that contemporary photography can be technologically experimental without being digitally driven. They demonstrate that photographic innovation can come from returning to elemental processes: sunlight, shadow, contact, growth, and time. In his work, the photograph is not simply an image of memory. It is memory made material.

Footnotes:

1. “Conversations with Artists: Binh Danh.” National Gallery of Art, www.nga.gov/stories/videos/conversations-artists-binh-danh.
2. “Binh Danh.” Regeneration, American Academy in Rome, regeneration.aarome.org/artists/binh-danh.
3. “Chlorophyll Prints by Binh Danh: An Interview.” Lomography Magazine, 4 Feb. 2016.
4. Feustel, Marc. “Legacy in Leaves: The Vietnam War Remembered.” TIME, 30 Apr. 2012.

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