Darkroom, River is a video projection with 4.1 sound, part of Thomas Pausz´s solo exhibition Haunted Ecologies at Stanley Picker Gallery. Looking for ways to represent an endangered chalk stream river, Pausz researched 19th century ´spirit´ photography, discovering that the techniques developed to manufacture ‘ghost’ in portraits were also used to modify landscapes by early photographers, particularly by E. Muybridge, who was born close to that particular river.

William H. Mumler was another famous spirit photographer, who became known for capturing iconic translucent ‘spirits’ which appeared next to portraits of living subjects. Mumler was later taken to court and prosecuted for fraud, and while never convicted, he was publicly shamed and eventually threw all of his photographic materials into the Hudson River.

During his early Fellowship experiments, Pausz revisited these two stories of rivers and spirit photography, taking analog photos of the Hogsmill River and immediately developing them in the darkroom, merging through the film the two liquid bodies of the polluted river and the photographic developer solution. Darkrrom documents the slow process of developing images of landscapes, and is accompanied by a composition with sounds recorded in the river using hydrophones. The soundscape was composed by the artist in collaboration with Icelandic musician Tómas Manoury.