CREATE (from) WASTE is Xander Linger’s response to the inherent waste and wastefulness in photography today.

In every step of the analogue photographic process – from the film, and the canisters and paper that hold it, to the plethora of chemicals used in processing film, and on to the reams of gelatin silver paper, chemicals, and many litres of water used in the darkroom to create enlargements – waste is omnipresent.

So instead of letting it all go to waste, Xander has piggy-backed on Ros Pach's idea for her concurrent THINK. exhibition and decided to create works of art from what would usually be seen as something to forget, to ignore, and to chuck away.

Xander Linger is an emerging photographic artist currently based in Melbourne town. After becoming disillusioned with the parochial and unimaginative nature of academic philosophy, he initially turned to analogue photography as a way to retain some vague sense of sanity while writing his thesis.

A year later, with a desire to move away from the monotonous tapping of a keyboard that produces words and works that never really seem to affect anyone or anything, he dived head first into creative pursuits by studying photography and never really seemed to leave the darkroom. Now head over heals in love with his swap from ink to silver halides, Xander is currently exploring ways to express and disseminate his philosophies through a visual medium by experimenting with any and all aspects of photography, primarily of the analogue traditions.

In this small body of work, Xander presents a few different ideas from over the past year – including large fabric prints produced from ends of colour film found in the bin and collages made from test strips and offcuts from outside the darkroom as well as chemically stained photographic paper left for dead that have since been scanned and artificially impregnated with pixels – that are in keeping with his desire to CREATE (from) WASTE