The Lenswork Interview

Last month I was interviewed by LensWork Magazine's editor Brooks Jensen and this is now available on 'Lenswork Extended" (CD #69) along with a folio of over sixty images.

A two hour long conversation has been edited down to a piece of a little under one hour.

You can hear a sample from the final CD version here


It is a short explanation of my image 'Ecce Homo' (shown here) which I hope listeners will find interesting.

The Artist Statement - First Draft

Life can be likened to a movie that is shown only once to a captive audience of one, a darkened room in which the level of illumination is a decision for the occupant.

But even the widest prairies have electric fences and beyond the wires leads me to blunder up against the wires whose muscle-shredding violence knows no mercy.

The perfect prison is the one in which the inmates have been convinced that really they are free. Society is such a confinement: the result of a binding contract made unwittingly between government and governed; I find myself attracted to neither camp. The guardians of society are troubled by their own shallows; the fears they have of others are the fears they have about themselves cunningly repackaged to increase their market appeal. The artist, on the other hand, is unafraid of his depths and if you offer him the chance to exchange the gift of his imagination for the mediocrity that passes for happiness in the lives of most others he will not make the trade. He will tell you that imagination is the instrument of self-knowledge.

The man of vision is charged with the duty of exposing our many grievous faults and failures, with dredging up to the light our dark and dangerous dreams for the purpose of improvement; to see the light we must first acknowledge that we are in the dark. Work which displays most accurately the deepest recesses of the human soul will, by default, display some rather unpleasant aspects of it. It is not the duty of Art to be acceptable to polite society. Wherever he may be, the artist will find himself a stranger as he is the only legitimate citizen of the world which he inhabits. His lone, dissenting voice is society’s surest line of defence against its greatest enemy which is, of course, itself. Were it not for the pain to be found in the wider world I might not have sought sanctuary in the confinement of my own where I have discovered an endless supply of the raw materials needed to make the images I do.

Unless the truth be sinful, it is not possible to find fault with a man who views the world through a camera though it is equally impossible in any given age to create work which is agreeable to everyone. Art often challenges existing assumptions rather than simply accommodating them; it is beyond 'good and evil', which are not the antitheses, but degrees of each other. I suspect that evil may not exist at all, at least not in the form in which it is presented to us, though there can be little closer to it than the hypocrisies of men and women who claim goodness for themselves. Morality is a disease peculiar to humans and at its worst human life is not tragic but unmeaning.

I am not seeking approval, as a sense of worth should be independent of the approbation of others. What I hope for is an acceptance of that unique quality which is the province of every soul, the discovery of which reveals that facet of creation reserved exclusively for it alone.

Art is not made by men and women who are wise, but by those in search of wisdom and to search at all is wisdom enough. Knowledge of oneself is the most that we can know.

The Process - Analog to Digital (and back again)

I have been asked to explain the process I use when making my images so I hope that the following will be of interest to some.

As I mentioned in the last post my images are produced as toned silver gelatin prints in limited editions of eight and sixteen. They are hand-made in a traditional 'wet' darkroom using an enlarger and photographic paper developed and then bleached and toned using chemical solutions.

As we become more conscious of the damage we are doing to our environment, traditional darkrooms may become even rarer than they are already as more laws are being passed to protect our water supplies and prevent noxious chemicals from polluting them. One printer in London that I have used in the past can no longer bleach and tone prints as it is now illegal to allow the chemicals he would use to enter the water system in his area. Interestingly, this stricture does not apply to all parts of the metropolis and other darkrooms can still use the solutions that are prohibited elsewhere.

I chose to limit my editions to eight prints as it is the size of the edition that Duschamps made of his 'Urinal'. When encouraged by a gallery to produce a larger edition, I chose a multiple of eight, ie sixteen.

When collecting the elements that I need to compose an image I shoot on colour transparency material because it is much more scanner friendly than negative material which is designed to be projected onto photographic paper and has a coarser composition which shows up all too readily as granularity in high resolution drum scans.

Normally I will shoot on a Bronica SQA 6x6 camera but I do occasionally drop down to 35mm and sometimes I have used 4'x5' and even 8"x10". More often than not I will use a standard lens though if space is very tight I will occasionally employ a wide-angle lens though I prefer, in these instances, to photograph my subject into two, three or four sections with a standard lens and then strip the pieces together in the computer.

For scanning I use a Howtek D4500 drum scanner which produces beautiful scans albeit slowly. I float the transparency in oil for optimum results. The Howtek has a feature allows the operator to manually focus the scanner's 'eye' on any part of the transparency that he chooses with microscopic precision. I, for example, when scanning a face always make sure that the eyes are the primary point of focus.

Once all the elements have been digitized then the compositing begins. The assumption is often made that I am using Adobe's PhotoShop but I have never used it. Ten years ago when I decided to invest in digital technology PhotoShop was less than impressive. I am sure that it has improved greatly in the intervening years.

I use a piece of software called Imaginator, made by Dicomed. The story goes that the Imaginator software designers enlisted the advice of working photographers during the design stages which would account for its ease of use for 'old school' photographers such as myself. The terms used in the menus are those I am familiar with and there are no distracting windows. The image is displayed on a simple black background and icons automatically disappear when not being used.

What separated Imaginator from its competitors years ago was its ability to offer infinite 'undos'; not 'undos' selected from a 'drop-down' history menu but limitless 'undos' applied subtly and in real time by the simple use of a digitizer's erase button. These 'undos' are also pressure sensitive which allows even greater control by the human operator over the will of the software design.

You might be interested to know that my work was seen by some 'Adobe Evangelists' (they do actually exist, if only in America) a few years' ago who could tell that it had not been made using PhotoShop. Make of that what you will.

When finished, the RGB greyscale file is then written/exposed to black and white negative material (usually T-Max) using a film recorder/writer which is essentially the scanning process in reverse.

This negative is processed in the usual way of any piece of exposed film and from the resulting negative the prints are made. It might be worth mentioning that digital negatives are often better than those made in a camera because of the controls that imaging software offers. One obvious advantage is the 'sharpening' filter which, used with discretion, produces a crisp negative result that contributes enormously to print quality.

What, no photoshop?

My work is sold in editions as toned silver gelatin prints. They are printed on Ilford warmtone FB semi-matt paper then bleached and toned with thiocarbamide which gives a range of tones; warm in the mid to high tones and cooler in the darker areas of the print. It also adds to the level of archival permanence of the silver in the print.

It may seem a form of madness to go back to negative material from a digital file when there are no so many inks and 'fine art' papers to choose from but I went to the 'old school' and I still haven't found a digital print that can match the beauty of a finely crafted darkroom print.

The traditional print comes into its own where an image has large areas of shadow detail as many of mine do. The chemical process can hold these details in a more pleasing way than I have yet to find in a purely digital process. I am sure though, that at the current rate of progress, this discrepancy will soon disappear.

Some of the colour 'giclee/inkjet' prints look stunning, especially when an image comprises vibrant colours and the beautiful 'art papers' look and feel superb but I have never been able to hold all my shadow details using these rougher, textured finishes. It is a compromise I cannot yet bring myself to make even though it would considerably cut the costs of my processing and printing bills.

Winging their way to me now are some test prints that Mike Crawford has made for me on Harman Technology's (Ilford) new paper developed for making BW inkjet prints. Mike has been helping Ilford to fine-tune these new products and he tells me thay are excellent. I will find out for myself in a few days time and will let you know how they look.

Mike is the magician who makes my silver gelatin prints which were once described by the Ricco Maresca Gallery in New York as some of the most beautiful prints they had ever seen. High praise indeed!