After 50 years of involvement movies and photography, I am concentrating on working with a few techniques where I can feel a direct link with the image.
Most of my work needs a large negative for contact printing I make orotones which require a good print onto glass
For the negative, I use calotype or collodion as I can create a negative of any size up to 50cm x 70cm directly in the camera, but the dry processes usually need long exposures (from 8 seconds to many minutes). For portraiture, long exposures are inconvenient so I either sensitise glass plates with a gelatin emulsion for large contact printing or use commercial negatives, mostly 13cm x 18cm. But I can use any size negative for a bromide print if I make the carbon transfer with a carbro process.
The carbro process is convenient if I work with my negatives with 5inch by 4inch, 6cm x 6cm or 35mm negatives I made when I was working as a commercial photographer.
I worked with computers, design and programming, since 1961 and used large format digital imaging since 1978, I do not use computing software or digital negatives for printing, (I do not even own a telephone).
Worked as freelance photographer from 1978 to 1988, specialising in portraiture and advertising.
Moved from London to France in 1991 – working as independent software and website developer
From 2014 moved back to photography and analogue work specialising in collodion (wet and dry), calotype, carbon transfer, carbro and analogue photography – I use these techniques to produce orotones
Currently I am working on utilising the work i have developed to involve anamorphic presentation and byzantine pictorialism
My aim is to use photographic techniques which create a direct contact, at a “quantum” level through the light originally reflected from the subject. To then present this as an image which shifts the conditioned reflexes to channel the image into a conventional perspective. This discipline demands that I cannot use any digital process, printing or computer adjustments.
I am attempting to adapt conventional optical equipment (lenses and prisms) to shift from the enforced concepts of perspective.
The aim is to involve tactile (and perhaps other) senses so as to circumvent conventions of optical perspectives.
My path has been long and varied. I was fortunate to be involved in some of the great films and work with some of the greatest directors and photographers of the 1960s and 1970s.
I am attempting to use the techniques I have acquired and the ideas I am developing to present images which can help others to see a clearer ‘picture’. With the tactile element of some of the ideas I am working with I hope to ‘show’ images to people with restricted sight.
