Slowly fading are the days where people actually had to develop their film photos, but photographer Matthew Cetta is still intrigued with the process and decided to conduct a few experiments. In his photo series, “Photogenic Alchemy”, he uses a toy camera and develops the films with all kinds of strange items, like cough syrup and Coca-Cola. Continue reading to see more.
The series was born out of a desire to play, Cetta tells us. The School of Visual Arts BFA photo grad was originally playing around shooting lo-fi photos using an old Holga camera when he began thinking about changing the look of his images by altering the film itself.
“A photograph, in its most elemental form, is nothing more than a chemical reaction,” he tells us. Photogenic Alchemy is an attempt to “alter that chemical reaction” using his own set of catalysts as an exercise in “controlled chaos.”
