The Silver Gelatine Salon

“The Silver Gelatine Salon” is a group exhibition that gathers more than 20 contemporary artists working with silver gelatin prints in the darkroom, treating the medium not merely as a reproductive technique but as a living, liquid, and deeply material practice.

The show, curated by Fabiola Menchelli, Melvin Lara, and Miguel Ángel Ortega, brings together gelatin silver prints and photograms that foreground the alchemy of light, chemistry, and time, insisting on the photograph as an object shaped by light, chemistry, tact, accident, and duration.

In an era of digital immediacy, these artists inhabit the darkroom as a site of research and resistance. Their prints are not neutral records, but bodies of evidence: surfaces touched by fugitive light transform into silver tones shifting from deep blacks to luminous whites. The works in the exhibition experiment with the photosensitive material, transforming it into a distinct visual language that speaks of process, materiality, and the artist’s intimate relationship with light.

The exhibition embraces photography’s liquidity, treating the photographic surface as a ground for mark-making, where the line, the gesture, and the trace of the hand assert themselves as much as any representational content. These works underline that the darkroom is not only a place of reproduction, but of invention, where photography is allowed to behave like a drawing, or a performative act.

The show also reflects on the social and historical weight of the darkroom as a space of labour, intimacy, and experimentation. Therefore, the title of the show evokes the historical salon and deliberately engages with that tradition, both adopting and challenging its conventions of display, hierarchy, and reception. At the same time, the title points to the darkroom itself as a kind of salon: an intimate space where images are developed, tested, debated, and ultimately brought into the world, shaped by the rhythms of chemistry, light, and the artist’s hand. In this double sense, the exhibition celebrates the silver gelatin print as a living, evolving medium whose material specificity and tactile presence continue to hold a vital and central place in contemporary practices.

The artists in the exhibition include Alexandra Germán, Ana Gadener, Andrea Martínez, Beatriz Díaz, Cannon Berlandez, Fabiola Menchelli, Humberto Ríos, Iñaki Bonillas, Jorge Rosano, José Luis Cuevas, Julia Carrillo, Margot Kalach, María José Sesma, Mauricio Alejo, Mike Counahan, Megan Ledbetter, Melvin Lara, Miguel Ángel Ortega, Omar Games, Oscar Farfán, Oswaldo Ruiz, and Ramiro Chávez.

This exhibition would not be possible without the incredible support of FocoLab’s new community darkroom in Mexico City.