Alison Rossiter: Expired Paper

Divided into sections that represent the breadth of ALISON ROSSITER’s process and vision, Expired Paper offers a comprehensive look at the artist’s body of work—Latent, Tarnish, Landscapes, Pools, Pours, Dips, Quads, and Collages. 

Art critic Leah Ollman has been contemplating Rossiter’s work for years, and her accompanying text serves as an ideal complement to the images: “All of the works pay homage to the rich idiosyncrasies of photographic papers across history, and restore a sanctity to the photograph as object. Made without cameras, lenses or film, the works are nothing but process and materiality. Their subject, if they can be said to have one, is time, photography’s most irreducible ingredient.” (Art in America)

The book also includes a selection of early twentieth-century photographic paper packages (which the artist has collected for over 30 years) in a separate booklet.

Alison Rossiter (b. 1953; Jackson, MS) creates camera-less photographs on expired, vintage photo paper that harness the untapped material potential of relics from centuries past. Her inspiration to work this way came from a foray into conservation work as a volunteer and appreciative observer at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which revealed to her the deep history of materials and supplies as the foundation of photography. Over the past two decades, the artist has assembled a library of photographic papers, with rare and prestigious examples dating back to the 19th century. A profound reverence for these papers is the ultimate motivation behind Rossiter's work: after years or decades in storage, she finally develops these historical samples, activating them after the effects of time have long played out on their surfaces. 

Rossiter's photographs are in the collections of major public institutions, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; New York Public Library, NY; Israel Museum, Jerusalem; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, PA; Art Institute of Chicago, IL; Philadelphia Museum of Art, PA; Minneapolis Institute of Arts, MN; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; and the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, CA. Rossiter currently lives and works in the New York City metropolitan area.