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Technicalities |
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25-01-2005 |
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Photography is very technical. No arguments there. There is a movement of photographers in contemporary art that is trying to do "untechnical" photography, using toy cameras, plastic lenses, etc... ("Lomography" is a good example of that) It is an approach that has some merits, just as any artistic approach, but it's not what my photographic work is about.
I've recently come across two very interesting characters in ULF photography, and interviewed them : Patrick Alt and Elsa Dorfman. (Patrick's interview will be online shortly, but you can see some of his work in the online galleries, Elsa's can be found here)
Both work with very big cameras, both use highly technical processes (Patrick Alt works with platinum printing, Elsa Dorfman works with Polaroid 20x24...), but their approach to these technical processes is very different. Elsa admits that if the camera she is using ever breaks down, she has to dig up an Polaroid engineer to fix it, that she is using a single studio setup with a sigle lens and a single kind of film, because she wants to stick with what she knows and concentrate on the subject.
Patrick Alt, on the other hand had a more technical approach. He was a camera restorer, he put back into service himself a century old camera, he is using a number of classical lenses for various effects, in short, his images are about how they were done almost as much as what they look like.
Now, I'm not trying to separate who's right and who's wrong between those two, they both have interesting approaches, and both produce interesting photographs. It's just an illustration of how a photographer can include as much or as little technicality in his images and still produce interesting images. The important thing is to produce images, no matter how they were done, digital, film, it's all good, as long as the main thing that created the image was the photographer, not just the technical side, and that's not always easy... |
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