Photo Basel 2025 — blackprint gallery

Photo Basel 2025 marked blackprint’s first participation in the fair. Our thanks to the entire Photo Basel team.

The works shown are presented briefly below; full documentation is available on the individual product pages.

Diego Brambilla

Three works from the Collection OFF — Structural Accidents, Ultraplanets, and Mingled with Void — were presented alongside Arbitrary Interventions on Abandoned Rocks, a blackprint edition. The Collection OFF brings together works produced independently by the artists themselves; the distinction matters here because each series by Brambilla involves a different photographic process, all of them anchored in the darkroom.

Structural Accidents photographs rocks onto which the artist has introduced an artificial element — a mark or object that neither explains itself nor resolves the boundary it traces between what was already there and what arrived. Gelatin silver prints on matt baryta paper, 55 × 65 cm, aluminium frame with anti-reflective museum art glass.

→ Structural Accidents

Ultraplanets begins with NASA archive images — factual photographs captured by probes and telescopes as scientific documents, not as photographs in any conventional sense. Brambilla transforms these files into physical negatives, reintroducing them into an analogue process before combining them with unrelated visual fragments in the darkroom. The development stage is where the process becomes most particular: rather than standard photographic developers, Brambilla uses plant-based formulations of his own making — Wineol, derived from wine; Rooibos, from the South African shrub; Caffenol, from instant coffee, vitamin C, and washing soda. Each formula produces a distinct tonal character — the result of an experimental process rather than a predetermined selection, the developer chosen through testing rather than assigned to a subject. Gelatin silver prints on matt baryta paper, 24 × 24 cm, natural oak or aluminium frame.

Each work is unique.→ Ultraplanets

Mingled with Voids uses Caffenol — a developer derived from coffee, vitamin C, and washing soda — as both a chemical process and a formal decision: the particular tonality it produces is part of the work, not a technical alternative to standard chemistry.

Gelatin silver Caffenol print.→ Mingled with Voids

Arbitrary Interventions on Abandoned Rocks, a blackprint edition, takes the same photographic attention to found surfaces in a different direction: each print is produced on handmade Bhutanese paper of 20 g/m², a paper no longer in production, and laminated between two panes of extra-clear glass set on a concrete base cast by the artist.

Unique variants. → Arbitrary Interventions on Abandoned Rocks

Daniel Rojatz

Two works from Der Theatral were presented alongside Nu Évanouissant — the first edition blackprint ever produced. Both series originate from the same glass plate negatives made by an anonymous Austrian photographer around 1910, printed on Cartalafranca, the artisanal paper from the Vallemaggia in Ticino. In Der Theatral, Rojatz draws directly over the printed image: thick strokes of black ink that cross the photographed body without concealing it, a contemporary gesture laid over a historical document.

Each work is phygital, registered on the blockchain via Verisart. → Der Theatral

→ Nu Évanouissant

Alexander Sporre

Rotms_zur_3 presents a standing nude so dissolved into grain that the figure can barely be separated from the field of noise surrounding it. The work is printed on handmade Himalayan paper of 20 g/m² and suspended within an open ash wood frame with Optium Museum Acrylic — held at the top edge by two small visible clips, not fixed, not mounted. The presence of the paper in the room is as deliberate as the image on it.

Unique variant, limited to 7 copies and 2 AP, signed and numbered. → Rotms_zur_3

wonow

A fragment of eux.lui.elle.nous — the phygital polyptych of four open wooden frames suspended from the ceiling, each holding two photographs on Haini Tengucho paper of 2 g/m², three of the four frames incomplete by design, their digital counterparts registered as NFTs on the Tezos blockchain — introduced the eux.lui.elle.nous — variations series developed from it.

→ eux.lui.elle.nous

→ eux.lui.elle.nous — variations (upcoming)

Regeneration, river stones documents a riverbed location photographed at intervals over 429 days — from 6 August 2022 until the storms of September 2023 altered the site irreversibly, covering the central rock under several metres of gravel. The project ran for 37,143,882 seconds and concluded when the place did. Each trace was sent in turn to the ten collectors who had acquired the originating work on Objkt.com.

→ Regeneration, river stones (upcoming)

Photography of works © blackprint, 2025