Darkrooms

The Hunterian at the University of Glasgow is delighted to announce the details of a new exhibition by leading Irish artist Gerard Byrne.

Darkrooms combines a video-based installation with an accompanying suite of photographic prints to explore the histories of photography, artist collaboration and cultural legacies.

The work brings audiences into the social and creative world of a once‑vital photographic darkroom in 1990s New York, reconnecting Byrne with a formative moment in his own artistic development.

Between 1994 and 2005, Byrne was a regular at Beth Schiffer’s Creative Darkroom, a busy colour darkroom in Tribeca. Used by photographers working across fashion, advertising, editorial, music and fine art, the space was a hub of conversations and creative exchange. Byrne’s new work revisits this moment, a period just before the emergence of the internet, leading up to 9/11, and at the conclusion of the last millennium. The output of the darkroom can be seen as a sociological archive of this time, and reflects changes in our collective relationship with photographs since then.