Interest in Photography

I have been inter­ested in pho­to­graphy since I was a child. I became enchanted when I saw an image appear on a sheet of paper float­ing in a dish filled with developer. That was bet­ter than magic. I received my first cam­era from my uncle. My moth­er took the next step when she signed me up for mem­ber­ship in a loc­al photo club. Soon, as a nine-year-old, I star­ted devel­op­ing my first pic­tures and I was show­ing off my know­ledge of optic­al aber­ra­tions to my play­mates. Two years later, our bath­room became my home dark­room when my always very under­stand­ing moth­er spent her last pen­nies buy­ing a second-hand pho­to­graph­ic enlar­ger. My old­est neg­at­ive, which I have still kept, dates from 1982 when I was elev­en years old. I have always been fas­cin­ated by the tech­nic­al side of pho­to­graphy with its goal of cre­at­ing a cap­tiv­at­ing, inter­est­ing and beau­ti­ful image.

I have spent many years look­ing for bet­ter res­ults as I was dis­ap­poin­ted with the form­al qual­ity of my tra­di­tion­al 35 mm pic­tures — des­pite their like­able con­tent. I have, also, envied the excep­tion­al pho­to­graphs taken by the mas­ters of the twen­ti­eth cen­tury. I decided to ascend to a tech­nic­ally more advanced level on a whim in 2000 and I entered the world of large format pho­to­graphy. This opened aven­ues that were pre­vi­ously closed to me. It enabled me to encounter an older and sim­pler form of pho­to­graphy before it became more auto­mated and stand­ard­ised. For example, a large format cam­era lets me set the plane of the film any way I desire, often not par­al­lel to the plane of the lens, yield­ing full con­trol of the per­spect­ive of the frame. This makes it easi­er for me to express the dynam­ic nature of see­ing in a stat­ic pho­to­graph. A 4 × 5” sheet of black-and-white film is cap­able of record­ing an image with a high fidel­ity, beau­ti­ful ton­al­ity, sharp­ness, and a par­tic­u­lar char­ac­ter that is not avail­able in a smal­ler format or even with digit­al photography.

Large format pho­to­graphy has its own spe­cif­ic require­ments: time con­sum­ing pre­par­a­tion for the day of work, slow­ing down of the entire approach, execut­ing addi­tion­al tech­nic­al steps in the cre­at­ive pro­cess. All of these obstacles actu­ally intensi­fy the engage­ment of my mind and of my heart. When I hide my head under the dark­cloth and I look at the upside-down, almost abstract image I find myself in a dif­fer­ent world — I con­tem­plate what I see and I increase my under­stand­ing of the pos­sib­il­it­ies a par­tic­u­lar scene might offer. Usually, I take between two and six neg­at­ives in a day ded­ic­ated to pho­to­graphy. There are days when after hav­ing set-up my cam­era I decide to put it away an hour later without mak­ing any expos­ures. This slow pace of work helps me improve both the form­al qual­ity and the sub­ject­ive con­tent of my pho­to­graphs and forms an import­ant aspect of my cre­ativ­ity. I respect pho­to­graph­ers who hav­ing shot hun­dreds of takes in a day find a num­ber of great images amongst them. Though I have tried that approach too, I feel decidedly bet­ter work­ing slowly and more med­it­at­ively. When I have been denied the lux­ury of this time con­sum­ing large format ritu­al, such as when tak­ing por­traits or when trav­el­ling in a more lim­it­ing way, I sim­pli­fy by using a medi­um format cam­era with 2½ × 2½” film. Often, it turns out to be only a tem­por­ary sav­ing as I return, pla­cated, to those places car­ry­ing my large format kit and resign­ing myself to the neces­sity of spend­ing the time I was try­ing to save by choos­ing that compromise.

Karolina Vyšata inter­viewed me in October 2010 for a photo book that accom­pan­ies the (Be)Longing exhib­i­tion, which she has cur­ated. This was her ori­gin­al ques­tion, which I have answered above:

You have been a pho­to­graph­er for many years. What is the ori­gin of your interest in pho­to­graphy and in large format? What makes you pas­sion­ate about it?