Trigger

And then, more hands – workers mixing materials and holding beakers; the gloved hands of the artist–researcher or archivist. Hands do not illustrate labour so much as register it. The hand becomes a point where image, body, and material process meet. M’barek weaves the archival AGFA photographs with her own images, creating a dialogue between archival histories and contemporary observation. In Untitled (Aperture), close-up images capture light illuminating hands – the hand as threshold to transition, revelation, or exposure. Exposure functions here in two ways: the exposure of the image and exposure to toxicity. A hand drips with photographic gelatin; eczema marks the hands of a photographic factory worker, the result of chemical exposure – irritated, worn, stained. Hands reveal porosity.

In photographic production, chemical precision depends on bodily vulnerability. From its earliest years, photography was entangled with chemical risk. Exposure accumulates, registering as inflammation, sensitivity, and damage. In 1864, the Photographic News named disease among the profession’s ‘special dangers’, pointing to the persistent dismissal of chemical hazards by medical authorities, despite repeated warnings from practitioners.^{‘The Health of Photographers’, Photographic News 8, no. 312 (26 August 1864): 409. For a broader analysis of these histories, see Siobhan Angus, Camera Geologica: An Elemental History of Photography (Duke University Press, 2024), 124–28; Jennifer Tucker, ‘Dangerous Exposures: Work and Waste in the Victorian Chemical Trade’, International Labour and Working-Class History 95 (July 2019): 130–65.} The body is an archive of industrial processes and chemical toxins. While the archive preserves images of labour, bodies retain its residue, carrying knowledge that never appears in captions or metadata.

M’barek’s evocative exploration of the Museum Ludwig’s AGFA archive began through the Artist Meets Archive programme organised by the Internationale Photoszene Köln. The resulting exhibition and book trace a history that moves from the intimate touch of hands and the vulnerability of the body through the ordered systems of museum archives and industrial chemical processes. It then extends outward into vast temporal flows of entropy and geological time, revealing how photographs index labour, matter, and history into a single, active surface. This shift between registers functions both visually and conceptually as M’barek manipulates zoom and scale, moving from the microscopic details of materials and images to the broader industrial and archival environments, revealing connective tissue between bodies, images, and vast systems of production.

M’barek’s attention to hands made me reconsider my own frustration at being directed to view a digital image rather than the physical object in an archive. Entropic Records makes a case that some knowledge emerges only through material encounter – through touch, weight, and surface – that no screen can fully convey. The tactile engagement reveals dimensions of the photograph that digital reproduction cannot replicate. Photographic knowledge is not only optical but tactile – learned through handling and exposure rather than observation alone.^{For an analysis of photography’s haptic dimensions, see Tina Campt, Image Matters: Archive, Photography, and the African Diaspora in Europe (Duke University Press, 2012); Margaret Olin, Touching Photographs (University of Chicago Press, 2012).}

Yet touch poses a risk to photographs. Instructions urge caution: gloves on, sometimes gloves off; pressure minimised; touch reduced to a controlled gesture. The archive frames touch as danger but the book reveals that photographs are already products of touch – mixed, coated, lifted, washed, and dried by hands exposed to chemical processes. Touch and handling reveal the intimate link between the body and the chemical processes that give photographs their material and visual life.

While the archive frames touch as both a mode of knowledge and a potential risk, it also foregrounds the material and chemical processes that make photography possible. To understand photographs as active, reactive surfaces, one must consider not only the traces of human handling but the chemical forces that shape, alter, and animate the image.

Despite the unruly materiality of analogue images,^{Jeff Wall, ‘Photography and Liquid Intelligence’, in Jeff Wall: Selected Essays and Interviews, ed. Peter Galassi (Museum of Modern Art, 2007), 109–110.} the chemicals industry developed a visual language rooted in containment.^{Siobhan Angus, ‘Ansel Adams at Union Carbide: Extractive Capitalism’s Wellsian Worlds’, forthcoming in American Art, 2026.}  Raw materials were isolated, combined, and manipulated into formulas that bore little resemblance to the materials that made them. In the AGFA archives, the gestures of pouring, mixing, and measuring repeat across the images, rendering the often-invisible forces of chemistry legible. A woman mixes colourful chemicals in circular glassware. The scene conforms to a familiar advertising iconography, in which photochemistry appears as a controlled and harmless manipulation of colour. The overt mise-en-scène, visible in the background, further signals the image’s staged nature. A man in a white lab coat, tie, and dark glasses calmly pours liquid into a tube. Then the factory floor: men prepare barite in large vats.

Here, the fantasy of containment fractures. A flash of orange-red anchors the image’s corner, spreading across a microscopic pattern. Another splash of red cuts through the middle. I’m drawn to the glowing red of the chemical dyes, noticing how they hint at both the human and chemical forces shaping the industrial environment. What was meant to be controlled now asserts itself within the images, erupting as stains, shifts, and blooms. An instrumental image of labour preserved in a corporate archive becomes a stranger document – one that captures the tactile instability of its medium. Marked by decay, the image confronts the twin ideals of photographic permanence and archival preservation.

Images of contamination make this unavoidable. A photograph from the Agfa-Gevaert collection, part of FOMU - the Museum of Photography, Antwerp shows two men in gas masks standing over a vat – an unsettling scene seemingly pulled from science fiction. It faces a photograph of the polluted waters of Silver Lake, where AGFA discarded photo-chemical waste in a former open-pit mine. The lake earned its name from the silverish tinge of the chemical residue. The pairing of the images speaks to the impossibility of chemical containment, where even the most carefully controlled processes leak, spill, and spread beyond their bounds.^{Katerina Korola has written about the histories of contamination at Silver Lake through the photographs of chemist and former Filmfabrik Wolfen employee Fred Walkow and Alexandra Navratil’s 2015 film Silbersee. Katerina Korola, ‘Silbersee: A Landscape Exposed’, paper presented at Chemical Histories of Photography, University of Basel, Basel, 24 October 2025. For a history of water contamination at Ciba, see Stephan Graf, ‘Du Cibachrome relativement toxique. Eaux usées de la photographie et production d’images en couleurs’, Transbordeur. Photographie histoire société, 8 (2024): 66–77.}   

Entropy

The photograph is always shifting with the fluctuations of temperature, humidity, pollutants, touch. They yield to the slow, inevitable forces of change – silvering, fading, fragility, and the spread of mould. Beneath the surface, chemical processes stir relentlessly, for all matter carries within it the pulse of entropy, a ceaseless drift toward dissolution.

Throughout Entropic Records, stains, mirroring, and discolourations interrupt clarity. The photograph moves beyond its instrumental role as corporate record and becomes a meditation on impermanence. Decay here is not negation. It’s a condition of transformation. For M’barek, entropy names the dissolution of intended meaning, allowing new forms to surface. In archives, decay marks decline; here, it opens other readings. Entropy produces a different kind of knowledge – tacit, embodied, resistant to categorisation. Physical traces act as epistemic agents.

The fossil matter – plants and trees transformed over millions of years – was extracted, refined, and chemically fixed onto the photographic image. In this way, the photograph carries traces of both geological time and industrial transformation: the deep past of fossil carbon intersects with the chemical processes of production, making the image a site where ancient matter and human industry converge.

As I attend to the images, I become aware of what has been extracted and transformed. Preservation attempts to stabilise these surfaces, but chemical bloom reveals what stabilisation suppresses: photography’s entanglement with extractive processes and their consequences. Degradation becomes disclosure.

Colour photography does not merely represent the world; through M’barek’s reframing, it activates geological time. Entropy connects the deep past to the visible surface. While looking, I find myself implicated in that flow. The insistent presence of hands anchors the image in the material world. Images arrive already altered by light, temperature, storage, and touch. Entropy has been at work long before I begin to read. The photograph presents itself as an active surface, still exchanging energy with its environment. Photography emerges here as condensed industrial and geological time, refracted through embodied perception. Meaning resides not only in what photographs show, but in what they absorb, endure, and transform. Reading M’barek’s work, we’re compelled to attend to the photograph as an active, porous surface: simultaneously record, agent, and witness of histories intimate, industrial, and geological.