Sine Van Menxel’s oeuvre consists exclusively of analogue photography. She regards the medium as both a technique and a subject. Whether behind the camera or within the darkroom, her attitude is resolutely experimental. For Van Menxel, as for many photographers, the core of the discipline is the manipulation of light and shadow. Yet she takes this a good deal further. So much so, in fact, that the meaning of her work lies more in the visual possibilities that her alternative technique opens up than in the subjects she photographs.
“A photograph can never be a pure registration. Manipulation is inherent to the medium of photography. I like to make my manipulations visible, so that the path a photo has travelled is materialised in the final image”, says Van Menxel. Amongst other things, the artist systematically creates ‘spoelbadcollages’ (rinse bath collages). After her photographs have passed through the development bath, the stop bath and the fixing bath in the darkroom, Van Menxel photographs the test strips and images lying together in the rinsing bath, before hanging them up to dry. They are registrations of the photographs she is working on at that moment and provide a glimpse of the creative process. The ‘spoelbadcollages’, which initially started out as an experiment, are now an essential part of Van Menxel’s practice and have grown into an extensive series within her oeuvre.
