Bella La Spina in 2026

Ghost Print
11.06. - 04.07.2026

“Maybe my camera is haunted, for its ability to expose things to me that weren’t there. This is a familiar feeling. I can’t see haunting, but I can feel it. It reveals itself to me in new ways.”

Bella La Spina’s ‘Ghost Print’ traces the dark nature of image processes. Pinhole photography, salt printing, and copper etching all depend on darkness for the image to emerge. Each begins in obscurity, passing through a series of transformations before becoming visible. The artist turns to her own archive of images captured over the past two years to reveal what is hidden beneath the photographic surface. Lighthouses and fragments of place are translated from photograph to etching, from etching to lithophane, and from negative to salt print. With each shift in material and process, the image moves further from its original form while retaining traces of what came before.

The physicality of each process influences the image; the medium exerts its own control. Rather than preserving the archive as a fixed record, the artist allows it to be subjected to repeated translations, revealing the marks that accumulate through transformation. In doing so, ‘Ghost Print’ considers how photographs continue to haunt us as imperfect, unstable documents of the past.

READ THE EXHIBITION ESSAY BY ALANNA FRANCES O’RILEY.