This photographer is racing against the clock to complete his life's work

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In this deeply personal profile of Oregon photographer Christopher Burkett, PBS NewsHour have shared the story of how the landscape photographer is racing against the clock to complete his life's work, after which he will finally hang up his camera and retire from photography.

Burkett works with a large format 8x10 camera and develops his images on Cibachrome, a dye destruction positive-to-positive photographic process.

Cibachrome is a silver dye bleach material that incorporates highly concentrated dyes into the paper’s emulsion. In the development process the dyes are bleached away proportionately, revealing color and forming a positive photograph. The advantage of the process is images retain impressive detail and colour, and are very resilient to discoloration and fading.

According to photographer Douglas Vincent, there are only about five full-time practitioners of the process in North America. Cibachrome was discontinued in 2011, and at the time Burkett purchased a ten-year supply, which he's now racing to finish using before it degrades. 

Once it does, or he is able to finish printing his life's work, he has no plans to move to digital and will retire for good.

“I also realize there’s gonna be one day when I leave the darkroom and I turn off the lights and that’s the last time I’ll be in there, so that’s a difficult thing because I love what I do,” he says. 

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