Over the past decade, photographer Robert Burley has traveled the world documenting the abandonment and destruction of film-based photography, namely, the factories where film was produced and the labs that developed it. Burley's atmospheric large-format photographs transport viewers to rarely seen sites where the alchemy of the photographic process was practiced over the last century-from the Polaroid plant in Waltham, Massachusetts to the Kodak-Pathe plant in Chalon-sur-Saone, France,the birthplace in 1827 of photography itself. As both fine art and documentary, The Disappearance of Darkness is an elegiac reflection on the resilience of traditional art forms in the digital era and a vital commemoration of a century-old industry that seems to have disappeared overnight.

Author Biography

Robert Burley is an established artist whose photographic work explores themes related to landscape and architecture. His landscape work attempts to define the transition between city and country through projects that include ORD: O'Hare Air?eld, Viewing Olmsted, and The Great Lakes. His commissioned architectural work is well known through the design press and he has completed several self-directed projects, among them The Places of Glenn Gould, Instruments of Faith, and House/Home. Burley's photographs have been extensively published and exhibited, and can be found in numerous museum collections including the National Gallery of Canada, Musee de l'Elysee, George Eastman House International Museum of Photography and Film, Canadian Centre for Architecture, and the Musee des beaux-arts de Montreal. Books featuring the work of Robert Burley include Viewing Olmsted: Photographs by Robert Burley, Lee Friedlander and Geoffrey James, O'Hare: Airport on the Prairie, and The Death of Photography: Robert Burley, Michel Campeau, Alison Rossiter.