In Implosion, Lucas Leffler explores a pivotal moment in the history of photography, linking two events that reshaped the industry in 2007: the launch of the first iPhone and the implosion of Kodak’s factories in Rochester, USA. These moments marked the shift from analog to digital photography—one ushering in the smartphone era, the other signaling the decline of film.
Refusing to accept the disappearance of silver-based photography, Leffler revives a 19th-century technique, ambrotype, to print images of Kodak’s destruction onto an unexpected surface: used iPhone screens. This historic process, in which an image is fixed on glass coated with a photosensitive emulsion, transforms the smartphone—an everyday object and symbol of digital photography—into a medium for a nearly forgotten craft.
By embedding Kodak’s downfall onto the very device that contributed to its decline, Implosion creates a powerful visual dialogue between past and present. It is both a poetic act of resistance and a reflection on technological obsolescence. Through his work, Leffler challenges us to reconsider the materiality of photography, the cycles of innovation and extinction, and the ways in which history can be preserved and reinterpreted through art.