Lisa Oppenheim

For my Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship, I propose to conduct research into the material, social, and economic histories around the material of celluloid film. Building on a body of photographic works I began in 2019–20, I hope to expand the scope of my historical research and to produce a speculative 16mm film tracing celluloid’s invention, development, and eventual demise. At the Smithsonian, I plan to research the agricultural bases of cellulose’s constitutive components of nitrocellulose and camphor and the colonial and labor histories around each; its introduction and widespread adoption by the photographic and motion picture industries; its popularization through advertising and trade publications; and the ways that the material’s ultimate obsolescence was directly related to the chemically unstable conditions of its own production.