Entangled Shadows: Mordançage at the Edge of Coherence

2025 · Mordançage and lith printing on silver gelatin Approximately 20 works, dimensions variable

The source images for this series are photographs of quantum systems — superconducting hardware, experimental apparatus, the physical infrastructure through which coherence is maintained and lost. These are objects I work with daily as a quantum physicist: devices engineered to hold matter in superposition states that survive for microseconds before collapsing into something definite and irreversible.

Every print in the series has been subjected to mordançage and lith printing. The emulsion lifts from the paper in veils and distortions that cannot be predicted or repeated. In the lith prints, grain structure coarsens and colour shifts unpredictably through the development. What were precise, clinical photographs of laboratory equipment become something else entirely — images that behave the way quantum systems behave. Coherence giving way to collapse. Controlled conditions producing uncontrollable results. The photograph itself becoming unstable.

This is not metaphor applied after the fact. The darkroom processes share a structural logic with the physics: both involve systems held in delicate states that are destroyed by the act of observation or intervention. Mordançage attacks the densest areas of the print first — the components of the quantum hardware rendered in deepest black — dissolving precisely the information the photograph was made to record. What remains is emergence: new forms, textures, and spatial relationships that did not exist in the original negative and could not have been designed.

The series was selected from 332 international submissions for the main exhibition at ROTLICHT Festival 2025 in Vienna, shown under the festival theme “Life After Extinction?” — a question the work addresses directly. Quantum coherence is a state that exists only briefly before it is lost. The analogue photographic processes used to make these prints are themselves increasingly rare, maintained by a diminishing community of practitioners. The work sits at the intersection of two forms of fragility, each one a way of holding something alive for a little longer than the conditions should allow.

Exhibition History

ROTLICHT Festival 2025 — “Life After Extinction?” Atelierhaus, Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, Austria · November 21–30, 2025 Selected for the main exhibition from 332 submissions across 43 countries. Exhibited alongside 19 international projects.