Ryan Gander
Oxidised Silver on Paper (2008)
An 8 x 10 inch contact print photograph showing a close-up of the world’s‘blackest black’ paint, produced by a team of scientists at the National Physical Laboratory in Teddington, Britain. Developed for use in the space exploration industry, the ‘blackness’ consists of a coating that will be used on the interior of the Hubble Space Telescope to improve its vision and is produced by a very lengthy chain of chemical processes, involving nickel sulphate and sodium hypophosphite. This produces a phosphorus coating, the surface then etched with nitric acid to produce the super-black surface structure. A 5 cm square coverage averages out at about five hundred British pounds.