Rachelle Bussières (b. 1986, Quebec City; lives and works in New York) is an artist working across photography, works on paper, and installation. Working in near darkness, she folds, masks, and rolls black-and-white silver gelatin paper, then exposes it to light for seconds, days, or weeks. In the studio, she tests the limits of the paper's light-sensitive surface through gesture and repetition; outdoors, she exposes it in rivers, forests, and mountains, letting the light and atmosphere of each place record themselves onto the paper. Only later, in a fixer bath without developer, does the final imprint appear for the first time: luminous blues, violets, pinks, and warm beiges; color not applied, but revealed. Treating light not as illumination but as a physical force, Bussières asks what emerges when an image is formed by time, environment, and material itself. Photography becomes less as capturing what stands before her than receiving what is already there, a slower way of attending to the world.

Bussières holds an MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute. Her work has been presented in solo exhibitions at Bigaignon (Paris), Robert Koch Gallery (San Francisco), Johansson Projects (Oakland), and Penumbra Foundation (New York), and in group exhibitions at Arter Art Museum (Istanbul), San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and Rhinoceros Gallery (Rome). Her work is held in public collections including the Museum of Contemporary Photography (Chicago), Arter Contemporary Art Museum, and the SFMOMA Archives. She has participated in residencies at Headlands Center for the Arts, Banff Centre, Silver Art, and Penumbra Foundation, and her work has been featured in Artforum, PhotoMonitor, and Lenscratch. She was awarded second place in the Snider Prize from the Museum of Contemporary Photography and was a finalist for the Aperture Portfolio Prize. She teaches at ICP and Penumbra Foundation and is the founder of LUMIERE NYC.