ATMOSPHERE STATEMENT
ATMOSPHERE
The pursuit of imagery, the hunt for hunter/gatherers like myself, leads to all things in the world that fascinate me. Lee Friedlander dos an amazing series called Flowers and Trees back in the 70-80s that I loved, combining the form and tonality if plant life into complex and surprising compositions. On the opposite end of that spectrum, Mapplethorpe's flowers are beautiful singular gems of color and simplicity.
In an attempt to craft my own take on this subject, considering I live where it's green and spring/summer all the time, I began using a square format Lubitel camera to make images of various subjects, including flowers and trees.
This particular camera requires manual forwarding of the film after each exposure. Often forgetting to do so, double exposures of my tree experiments began to show up in my contacts...
Yes, this project is with traditional film. I feel like it's my toehold in the traditional process of my craft.
A curious phenomena occurs when the double exposures line up a certain way. The foliage spins, explodes and vibrates through the frame. They take on a new life of their own, literally alive within the flat 2 dimensional plane of the photograph. I began purposely exploring these "happy accidents." Switching to Swedish Hasselblad medium format camera helped to really sharpen the in focus parts while creating beautiful "bokeh" in the fuzzier parts.
This project so interests me as the images that occur by accident that I've continued to explore them now for over a decade, never tiring of the surprising results and response to them.
The pursuit of imagery, the hunt for hunter/gatherers like myself, leads to all things in the world that fascinate me. Lee Friedlander dos an amazing series called Flowers and Trees back in the 70-80s that I loved, combining the form and tonality if plant life into complex and surprising compositions. On the opposite end of that spectrum, Mapplethorpe's flowers are beautiful singular gems of color and simplicity.
In an attempt to craft my own take on this subject, considering I live where it's green and spring/summer all the time, I began using a square format Lubitel camera to make images of various subjects, including flowers and trees.
This particular camera requires manual forwarding of the film after each exposure. Often forgetting to do so, double exposures of my tree experiments began to show up in my contacts...
Yes, this project is with traditional film. I feel like it's my toehold in the traditional process of my craft.
A curious phenomena occurs when the double exposures line up a certain way. The foliage spins, explodes and vibrates through the frame. They take on a new life of their own, literally alive within the flat 2 dimensional plane of the photograph. I began purposely exploring these "happy accidents." Switching to Swedish Hasselblad medium format camera helped to really sharpen the in focus parts while creating beautiful "bokeh" in the fuzzier parts.
This project so interests me as the images that occur by accident that I've continued to explore them now for over a decade, never tiring of the surprising results and response to them.