Robert Burley Buries Kodak at CONTACT Photo Festival

Robert Burley, Demolition of Buildings 65 & 69
Kodak Park, Rochester

Robert Burley (installation photomontage at CONTACT)

Speaking of photographic processes fading into obscurity, there’s a rather poignant exhibition by Canadian artist Robert Burley showing right now as part of the CONTACT Photo Festival in Toronto.

From the press release:

“Toronto artist Robert Burley is currently documenting the fate of
chemical photography, recording the abandonment and demolition of
various Kodak plants. The films, papers and processing chemicals these
factories produced will soon be obsolete, although Burley himself is
still physically printing images from negatives, albeit ones he edits
digitally. The most notable of Burley’s large, highly detailed colour
photographs shows the implosion of buildings 65 and 69 at Kodak Park in
Rochester, N.Y., where a crowd that includes people who worked in the
plant busily snap pictures of its demise on their digital cameras.
Whatever sacrifices it may demand, technology is irresistible. A giant mural of this hugely ironic image – created thanks to digital
technology, of course – now greets anyone who enters the courtyard of
Toronto’s Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art on Queen Street West.”

Here are some images from the Burley series Disappearance of Darkness, which documents the final year of the
Kodak Canada facility in Toronto. This facility, which was made up of
18 buildings on a 5 hectare site, had a one hundred year history of
producing photographic films and papers. It was sold in 2006 and
demolished in the summer of 2007.

The Coating Facility, Building Thirteen, 2006

Employee Meeting – West Parking Lot, Last Day of Manufacturing Operations, 2005

Darkroom #2, Building Three, 2005

Main Entrance, View from Photography Drive of Buildings Seven and Nine, 2006


The Processing , Building Ten, Kodak Canada, 2006


Demolition #2, Kodak Canada, 2007

Entrance to Coating Facility, Kodak Canada, Toronto 2005

Traffic Corridor, Building Three, 2006

Darkroom #16, Building Three, 2006

Stairwell in Drying Rooms, Kodak Canada, Toronto 2005

The Hopper, Kodak Canada, Toronto 2005

Sigh.

Read more about CONTACT, which also includes exhibitions by Raymonde April, Luc Delahaye, Nan Goldin, Adi Nes, Martin Parr, Chi Peng,
Thomas Ruff, Alessandra Sanguinetti, and Bert Teunissen.