Why Anachrome?
Defining the Anachrome Protocol
The Problem of Abundance
We live in an age of infinite images. Every second, millions of photographs are made, shared, duplicated, and forgotten. The phone in your pocket can generate more pictures in a week than an entire lifetime of work for the great photographers of the 20th century.
But in abundance, meaning dissolves. What does it mean to own, to hold, to treasure an image, when there are infinite copies, infinite feeds, infinite archives?
The Answer: Scarcity Through Ritual
The Anachrome Protocol is my response to this collapse of meaning. It is a photographic process built on ritual, scarcity, and destruction.
Each work begins with a roll of medium format film:
Twelve frames are exposed.
Eleven are destroyed.
One survives.
That single frame becomes the After-Image: printed, signed, certified, and delivered to the collector. There are no backups, no duplicates, no hidden archives. What survives, survives — and what is gone, is gone forever.
What “Anachrome” Means
The word Anachrome is deliberately coined.
Ana-: from the Greek, meaning “back, again, throughout.”
-chrome: from the Greek khrōma — color, image, film.
Anachrome is not nostalgia. It is not retro for retro’s sake. It is the act of looking back as a form of resistance. It is deliberate anachronism in a digital age — a refusal of infinite duplication, a return to scarcity, a ritual that scars as much as it creates.
Why Destruction Matters
The destruction is not waste. It is proof.
By burning, cutting, or otherwise destroying the eleven rejected frames, the protocol transforms the survivor into an artefact. The After-Image is not merely a photograph — it is the visible evidence of what was lost. The absence of the others defines its value.
Scarcity is not a flaw. It is the point.
The Role of the Collector
To commission an After-Image is to enter into this ritual. You are not simply purchasing a print. You are commissioning a process of creation and destruction, and receiving the sole surviving artefact.
Your After-Image is yours alone — not a copy, not an edition, but a singular witness to its own survival.
Closing
The Anachrome Protocol is both method and philosophy. It is photography as ritual, destruction as proof, scarcity as art.
Every After-Image you will see here — in this ledger, in this archive — is the product of Anachrome.
One roll. Twelve frames. Eleven destroyed. One survives.
Subscribe to witness future After-Images as they survive the ritual.