Meredith Davenport
2026 Aurora + Herron Residency
Meredith Davenport will spend her two weeks in the Herron darkrooms making large-scale silver gelatin prints from her series Sym-poiesis in preparation for an upcoming exhibition at Visual Studies Workshop. She also plans to make good use of Herron’s Flextight scanner to catch up on making high-quality scans of her 4 x 5 negatives.
Davenport’s series Sym-poiesis explores the interdependent and entangled relationships between humans, non-humans, and time in the landscapes of anthracite coal extraction in Pennsylvania. Over the past three years, she has created these images of mining sites by exposing multiple times over several seasons, creating layer landscapes that she considers a collaboration with chance, time, and place that she can’t control.
Davenport writes of the series, “The process used in Sym-poiesis is meant to subvert the traditional, historic role of large format film cameras, which were used as a tool to create formal, idealized depictions of industrial exploitation beginning with the US Geological survey. I use repurposed x-ray film which is developed in eco-friendly darkroom chemistry. Some of the prints are made with handmade emulsions of carbon and Acid Mine Drainage pigments recovered from local rivers and images of fossils exposed during the mining process.”
While in Indianapolis, Davenport also hopes to visit local mining and reclamation sites to make new photographs using a stockpile of 8 x 10 x-ray film that she has collected for the residency.
Meredith Davenport is an artist and educator living in upstate New York. Her documentary projects have appeared in National Geographic, German Geo, The New York Times Magazine and in many other publications. Meredith has received the American Aftermath Project award, a Pew Fellowship, The UNICEF Child Photo of the Year, a Puffin Foundation Project grant and has been invited to residencies at Yaddo, VCCA, BANFF, Antenna Paper Machine and the Everson Museum. Her work has been exhibited in New York at the International Center of Photography and Union Docs. Her book Theater of War was published in 2014 by Intellect Press and is distributed by the University of Chicago Press. Her book Membering was published in 2022 by Antenna Paper Machine. She is an Associate Professor of Photography at the Rochester Institute of Technology.
The Aurora + Herron Residency, a collaboration between Aurora PhotoCenter and Herron School of Art and Design/IU Indianapolis since 2021, offers a two-week intensive work period in the Herron darkroom facility and studios for experimentation, research, and development of new or ongoing projects. Read about former Aurora + Herron Residents and their projects: Tarrah Krajnak, Eli Craven, Priya Kambli, William Camargo, and Shawn Bush.
This project is supported in part by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.
The Aurora + Herron Residency would not be possible without the following partnerships.
Herron School of Art + Design will supply darkroom access, basic chemistry, and onsite support during the residency. Aurora PhotoCenter thanks Herron School of Art + Design for its generous support of this residency.
The resident will stay at CAMi as part of a continuing program for visiting artists staying and working at the CAMi campus all year round. Aurora PhotoCenter thanks CAMi for its generous support of this residency.
