Wellington photographer Shaun Waugh frames well-used Agfa boxes that previously held photographic developing paper as a contemporary artwork.

Agfa black+white photographic paper was lauded for its quality hand-developing properties, its optimal colour saturation and rich black tones. The paper became harder to get, and disappeared completely when the Agfa factory closed in 2004.

Waugh mines photography’s histories, technologies and processes, exploring tensions between image- and object-making. Waugh presents this monochromatic installation as a memoriam to Agfa, variably arranging the brand’s distinctive orange-coloured box lids, playing with the intricacies of our colour perception.

The work’s title comes from the International Commission on Illumination’s standard measure for differences between two similar colours using the ΔE (Delta E) metric. The Greek letter Delta denotes difference, and E stands for Empfindung, German for ‘sensation’.

Shaun Waugh (born 1982, Townsville, Australia) completed his MFA in 2012 at Massey University Wellington where he works as a Lecturer in photography. Waugh has shown at Christchurch Art Gallery, Victoria University’s Adam Art Gallery, City Gallery Wellington, Govett-Brewster Art Gallery New Plymouth and the Centre for Contemporary Photography at Monash Gallery of Art in Melbourne. His work is held by the Chartwell Collection, Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki, and Victoria University of Wellington.