Mold is beautiful

"Mold is the number one foe of archives. In that context, its creative potential is unfairly overlooked. Yet since the dawn of time man has used microorganisms to make bread, wine, beer and cheese. In the area of heritage, mould is above all a “hazardous damaging agent” that must be fought. In an 1856 text to encourage research on the stability of photographic processes, chemist Victor Regnault, the first president of the Société française de photographie, emphasized that time alone would tell how long a picture made using a certain process would last. Likewise, it is with time that mould does its work. These pictures spoiled by a long-ago flood — forgotten wonders, the successful result of negligence and disinterest — have been kept in darkness for years. Their solitary confinement, together with the organic resources inherent to their process (gelatine and potato starch), has turned out to be fertile ground for creative, random proliferation. Today they are on view. Time has taken its toll on these images, which remind us how much a photograph’s aesthetic qualities lie outside artistic control".

Luce Lebart