Justine Varga’s most recent body of work End of Violet continues to explore the intimate exchange between film and what comes to be inscribed on it. Employing analogue techniques, her cameraless photographs are made over long periods, sometimes years. Rather than documenting the details of the recognisable world, these images explore the chemistry, physics, history and phenomenology of photography itself. The electrifying, colour-saturated works in End of Violet bring to mind the aesthetics of expressionist painting and drawing, and although they are abstract, they can be understood as self-portraits. To achieve this Varga exposed the negatives to light by carrying them around in her palm, painting them with different substances, including nail polish and saliva, and then worked on them in the darkroom to produce these captivating photographs.
