What Happens When You Bathe Film in Bleach and Lemon Juice

Ajay Malghan’ used coffee, vinegar, soap, hydrogen peroxide and even oven cleaner to distress his negatives, creating the abstract and fascinating images of his series, "Bleached."

Looking at Ajay Malghan’s series Bleached, you'd be forgiven for some initial confusion. Are they vascular systems under the microscope? Satellite images of remote parts of our planet? Space photographs of far-off nebulas? Not at all. These images are decidedly less technical. They're just 35mm film Malghan distressed with things you probably have in your kitchen right now.

“Coffee, vinegar, soap, hydrogen peroxide and oven cleaner,” says Malghan. “Basic items that we all have in our kitchens.”

Fascinated by the corrosive effects of everyday acids and driven by nervous energy, Malghan stepped away from the digital workflows of his other photography series and started bathing strips of film with “crass tools.” He's found the abstract results hugely gratifying. “I can show one image to 10 different people and get 10 different responses,” he says. “For me, abstract art is the purest form of art since you can make it to be about anything you want.”

Abusing film isn't new, but motivations for such projects vary. Matthew Cetta, for example, found an element of therapy in destroying photographs. Malghan is more reactive. Bleached is a one-finger salute to the overly serious art world that wraps its work in pretension and self-importance. Malghan simply wanted to play and experiment; to do instead of think.

“Everything around me [in photography] was literal and standing on the shoulders of lengthy explanations. So I went the other direction,” he says.

Just because Bleached is not highbrow, however, doesn’t mean it’s child's play. Malghan brings a certain level of scientific know-how to the experiments. His father is a chemical engineer and taught him about chemicals at an early age. “I’ve been hanging around labs for as long as I can remember,” says Malghan. “Ph strips were toys to me.”

The real spark for the project came when the Minnesota Dental Association published the The Power Of Sour On Your Teeth campaign. Malghan began to consider the acidity all around us, particularly in candies and food. “WarHeads are right next to battery acid," he says of the candy, which derives its surprisingly sour flavor from malic acid. "SweeTarts and Skittles aren’t that far off. I started thinking about what I could do with those things and film emulsion.”

Over the course of the project, Malghan's thought a lot about the photographic process. It's made him respect the early pioneers who experimented with chemicals to perfect the photographic process. “Knowing what Louis Daguerre and Henry Fox Talbot went through in countless trials with different chemicals to create an image makes my 5D seem like a toy,” he says.

Malghan encourages others to try film-distressing because it's been so freeing. But he offers a warning to those who want to start pouring chemicals on film: “If anyone is reading this and thinking of experimenting with this process please do so in an open area with gloves and a mask,” he says. “Don’t be a knucklehead.”