Robert Burley's Photographic Proof at Le Mois de la Photo in Montreal.

Robert Burley's contribution to Le Mois de la Photo a Montreal is a dramatic, larger-than-life depiction of a freshly-opened Polaroid, plastered on the outside of the Canadian Centre for Architecture. The material used to bond the image to the bricks is brand-new, made possible by digital technology, but both the 'Polaroid' frame and the subject Burley depicts pay tribute to an earlier photographic process - analogue. For Burley's image shows the controlled explosion of the Kodak-Pathe plant in Chalon-sur-Saone, France, near where Nicephore Niepce first discovered photography. It's part of a four-year project on the death of film photography called The Disappearance of Darkness, in which Burley photographs the destruction of photographic film and paper plants.

'I’m based in Toronto and in 2005 I discovered that Kodak Canada was going to close the plant nearby,' says Burley. 'I had access through people I knew, so I was able to go and document the plant before it closed down in 2006. It was fascinating because although I’ve been involved with photography since high school, I didn’t really have a thorough understanding of how photographic materials are made. Companies were often proprietorially secretive about their processes, so it was amazing to be able to see how it was done first-hand and have access to engineers who could explain more.

'This photograph [taken in France] was shot in December 2007. Kodak, a name that used to be synonymous with photography, did a number of scheduled implosions of film plants around the world because they really couldn’t be adapted to any other use, and also I think as a symbol of the company's development from one technology to another. It was really a big event - I joined a crowd of people, many of whom had worked there for many years, to see the end of traditional photography. This plant used to run seven days a week, 24 hours a day, producing football fields of paper. But digital technology is faster, cheaper, more flexible, so film is kind of over.'

Burley believes digital technology augurs death of traditional photography, partly because analogue films and papers rely on economies of scale to be made and - more fundamentally - because digital image-making doesn't command the same evidential status as analogue. 'I've called this installation Photographic Proof because what’s disappearing, alongside the photographic materials, is our faith in images,' he says. 'Of course it was always possible to manipulate film, but it was like sculpting with stone compared with sculpting with clay – it was very difficult and only possible with special tools. Digital technology changes all that.

He wants to explore those changes, and the new possibilities opened up by digital imaging, he says, rather than simply trying to reject it. 'I am a traditional photographer, I’ve worked with film and photographic paper my whole life but this piece is really about my confrontation with new technology,' he says. 'It's about trying to make sense of two technologies that really define photography today – the first the traditional films and paper, the other digital media. Digital imaging really redefines not just what I make in terms of the pictures but what you see as a viewer. There really isn't much of a relationship between films and papers and digital imaging, it's not a case of a simple evolution from one to the other, and that changes both our relationship to images, and how we look at the world through images.'