Towards a more ethical practice
Being an ongoing rambling account of where I’ve got to so far in my photographic practice, and how and why I got here…
I try to be a good person. I’m no social justice warrior but I’d rather leave this place in no worse state than how I found it. In my day to day life I try to be mindful of what I leave in my wake. I live a fairly frugal existence and I choose to ‘mend and make do’ over bin and buy new. I’m also one of those tiresome people who continually bang on about the righteousness of only using second hand computers with open source operating systems and software, and go to great lengths to avoid ever shelling out a penny that will go into the corporate coffers of ‘Big Tech’ (all the while conscious that I’m writing this on WordPress and paying BlueHost for the privilege of hosting it.)
Making any kind of art invariably means making a bit of a mess. It’s a cliche I’m sure I’ve heard attributed to everyone from Aleister Crowley to Pablo Picasso, that “the first act of creation is destruction”, but I think there is some truth in this. Many years of teaching at art-schools have allowed me to bear witness to countless skips full of the flotsam and jetsam generated in the process of creativity, and I’d rather not add too much more to that score myself.
Upon moving out of the city, some twenty-odd years ago, I tried for a long time to make use of the materials I could easily find within my immediate surroundings, for my art practice. Thus followed a period of working with found wood and rocks. Having had a predominately lens-based practice since my undergrad days, this is also something I’ve been able to maintain without summoning the guilty burden of bringing more ‘stuff’ into the world. The rise of remote digital media servers even meant that I could finally stop filling my archive/cupboard with yet more 35mm slides, U-matic, VHS, SVHS, MiniDV, CD-R and DVD’s, etc. Alas, ‘The Cloud’ didn’t turn out to be all sunshine and rainbows. The imminence of the forthcoming climate apocalypse soon revealed itself to be increasingly hastened by the activities of these power-hungry data-centres, and that’s a trail of devastation possibly dwarfing the future landfill potential of the amount of physical media I might generate. This, along with the seemingly unstoppable march of AI, has caused me to pause and reflect on what I produce in the digital domain (present company excepted) and reconsider the importance of returning to, more tangible, analogue processes and outcomes.
As alluded to elsewhere on this meandering website, the reactivation of my dormant photographic practice with the adoption of a couple of second hand mirrorless digital cameras, meant that I steadily built up a cupboard full of old film cameras, from which I was harvesting the lenses. This fell squarely into the camp of not bringing anything new into the world whilst keeping technology, which still had a useful life, out of landfill. It wasn’t long before I was questioning the role of digital media in the photographs I was making. I grew frustrated with every stage of the process, from the sensor and firmware in the cameras to the Open Source post production software I was using to render the images ready for printing. It felt like the optimising routines of the technology and code were always steering me in the direction of results that misrepresented the tangible sensations of being present in the landscape that I was trying to make manifest.
Enter the Darkroom
A mixture of curiosity and nostalgia led to me shooting off a few rolls of film with a couple of the old SLRs acquired for ‘lens harvesting’. However, the negatives still had to be scanned to make prints. So I looked into the feasibility of setting up a home darkroom in my garage. It soon became apparent that, just like the SLRs, there were piles of enlargers, and other darkroom equipment, cluttering up lofts up and down the country. Online marketplaces were full of last-chance saloon sales from people just wanting to avoid a run to the local tip. Before long I had a nice old Czech Magnifax 4 capable of enlarging anything from 35mm to 6×9 medium format negatives. Which, of course, led to me wondering what it might be like to shoot medium format again. My last (and first) medium format camera was a Mamiya 645, which I part exchanged back in the late 80s for my first video camera (a Sanyo Video8). This is the point at which I fell down the rabbit hole of antique folding cameras. Umpteen folding cameras, rangefinders and SLRs later, I was thoroughly emerged in film photography, to the almost complete exclusion of digital, and happy to be able to print what I was shooting without needing to scan a negative or rely on labs. The caveat was that this was all black and white.
When I bought the second hand enlarger, it also came with miscellaneous darkroom equipment including quite a lot of expired photographic paper. I knew that there was a good chance that this might be fogged or even completely unusable, but at least it would be something to start practising with. The good thing about this though was how it encouraged me to research best uses for expired paper. My first foray into lith printing came out of this, followed by a quest to buy up as much cheap, expired photographic paper that I could lay my hands on.