Landscape as Autofiction

These photographs were made, within a couple of miles walk from my home, from the summer of 2024 to the present day.

Notes on Process

There was an unintended consequence of accumulating a diverse array of different old, manual lenses for my digital cameras. The most cost-effective way of buying old lenses is to buy them still attached to old cameras. This is because old cameras don’t retain their value as well as their lenses. This resulted in me building up an accidental collection of old film cameras.

The majority of my artwork as a student and just after graduating was photography based, but until very recently I hadn’t used film for around 30 years. Two factors were instrumental in reigniting my interest in returning to film photography. One was this huge cache of cameras I seemed to have acquired. The other was a tipping point in my tolerance of AI generated imagery. Suddenly it seemed like just about every image, photographic or otherwise, that I was seeing on every screen, contained increasing degrees of artificially generated content. Even the software required to edit and print, relatively unadulterated, photographs made with a digital camera introduces algorithmically calculated routines. Intentional authorship is being dissolved by the invidious morass of digital image-making technology.

Taking the digital out of the process entirely, meant also setting up a darkroom to develop my own film and make my own prints. This meant re-learning long-forgotten knowledge and skills – it had been 40 years or more since I’d used a darkroom. The upside is that this change in process results in tangible artifacts – actual physical prints – rather than endless gigabytes of data embedded in hard drives. The nature of working with film, and darkroom printing, also slows down the whole process. This means that each step becomes more thoughtful and considered.

For these photographs I used a variety of elderly 35mm and medium format SLR cameras and lenses, along with various rangefinder and scale-focusing folding cameras, which date from the 1930s to the 1950s. These are scans from (mostly) 8×10 inch prints made in my darkroom.