When the 2008 financial crisis hit, photographer Phil Chang felt compelled to respond—but not in the way you might think.
Instead of photographing foreclosed homes or scenes that depicted the demise of Lehman Brothers, he decided to embody themes of loss and instability through the photographic medium itself.
This flash of inspiration became Chang’s series Unfixed Works, in which the instability of the photographs is the art. Chang created a method for making photographs that look ordinary at first, but over the course of a few hours in an exhibition, the images fade away, leaving behind blank maroon photographic paper and just a memory of what the image used to be.
Chang revived the series during the COVID-19 pandemic, and photographs from Unfixed Works inspired by this crisis are on display at the Getty Center through July 7 as part of the new exhibition Nineteenth-Century Photography Now. The exhibition features work by 19th-century pioneers of photography as well as contemporary photographers who provide a fresh perspective on the early creators.
“I'm fascinated about how we produce photographic images,” Chang says. “How do we let them circulate in the world? And then how do we consume them? I use a camera to make photographs, but I know they will then fade and transform to monochromes. And oddly, that's become very liberating. For better or worse, I'm not beholden to the static representation that we expect of photography.”
Photography, by way of sociology
Chang’s journey into photography was as nontraditional as his photography. A first-generation American, Chang was raised in Indiana; his immediate family included his parents, brother, and a white woman from Mississippi who provided childcare and became a second mother to him. Chang describes her as “incredibly loving, but incredibly racist.”
“I learned the significant difference between prejudice, which I think is an attitude, and discrimination,” Chang says. “She never discriminated against my brother and I, but she would express her prejudice all the time. So it was a really odd upbringing, and I thought it was normal for everyone to go through this, but it wasn't.”
That experience inspired him to study sociology at UC Irvine, though he pursued a career in graphic design after graduating and eventually discovered his passion for photography on a fluke. Chang’s father, worried about his son’s future, bought him a subscription to Fortune magazine. Then Chang received a 35-millimeter wind-up panoramic camera in the mail as a promotional thank-you gift from the magazine.
Chang found himself translating his interest in sociology into photography, shooting the streets of Los Angeles and taking photography classes at night. He eventually earned his MFA from the California Institute of the Arts, where he moved away from documentary photography to explore different ways his photography could function as an art form. His work has appeared at museums and galleries nationally and internationally, and he’s also currently a professor of art at CSU Bakersfield and the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College.
Unfixing photography
A chance encounter led Chang to his “technically unsophisticated” (his words) technique for printing images that fade away. While a staff photographer at UCLA in 2007, Chang received an expired box of Kodak Kodabrome II RC paper. He opened it, realized it had expired in 1993, and left it on his studio table. Some other papers landed on top of it, and when he came back an hour later, he discovered that an impression had been made on the Kodabrome paper. It turned out that the expired paper contained just enough silver halide (the light-sensitive material in the paper) to produce an image during the initial exposure process, but with further exposure, say, hanging on a wall, the image fades away.
Through trial and error, he developed his process: First, he prints a negative of a digital image onto transparency film, then lays the film between a sheet of Kodabrome paper and a sheet of anti-Newton ring glass. He places a desk lamp on a stack of books to raise the light up to about 11 inches from the glass, tapes a contrast filter (like what you might find in a darkroom) over the bulb, and aims the light at the photographic paper. Finally, he stands pieces of cardboard around the lamp and paper to provide some shelter from ambient light.
The print is fully exposed after about an hour. Chang covers the finished images in light-safe black plastic until he’s ready to display them; the image fully fades after about five hours in an exhibition. He’s careful to print a variety of images (during the pandemic, he printed screenshots of his computer activity), mostly benign subject matter in which nothing feels more “dramatic” or “polemical” than anything else. After all, every image will eventually fade away.
Witnessing art in action
In Nineteenth-Century Photography Now, five prints each of three different images from Unfixed Works will be shown throughout the run of the exhibition, with prints swapped out as they fade so visitors can observe how they change over time. A time-lapse video on view in the exhibition also shows the fading process. Chang’s work is displayed alongside photographs by 19th-century photographer William Henry Fox Talbot and contemporary photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto, who were both also interested in how photographic images fade. Getty acquired several of Chang’s works, so more photographs from Unfixed Works may go on display in future exhibitions.
When Chang has shown Unfixed Works in galleries and exhibitions in the past, he’s received a range of responses from viewers. “Those with financial stakes feel guilty because they don't know how to commodify, sell, or circulate the works,” Chang says. “But those who do not have commercial stakes with the work, like scholars, writers, critics, and artists, treat it as an artwork.” He’s eager to be a fly on the wall and observe how Getty visitors interpret the work.
“I hope people think, ‘I'm really being challenged to consider, what's the value of an artwork? Is it the experience or the idea of it?’” Chang says. “Or is it the static representation of an image that we always expect to be static?”
Nineteenth-Century Photography Now is on view at the Getty Center through July 7, 2024.
