Field Work: Making Photographs

At all turns, we have reason to lament. Is it time for beauty?”, I asked photo students at the start of this semester. “If we work on beautiful things together, can beauty repair us?”

We began by hand-building large-format pinhole cameras for 4x5” paper and film. We went on several field trips in and around Regina to explore these media within the constructed landscape, developing prints on site in a portable darkroom tent.

The works created by students combine experimental photo-chemical black and white processes with digital post-production. This powerful combination of silver, bits and bytes, and archival pigment printing allows artists to explore the wonder of black and white photography while harnessing contemporary software to refine their works.

Our goal was not to create a collection of conventionally beautiful photographs. Indeed, we often did everything we could not to using lens-less cameras and long-expired film. Students worked with the exposure and contrast limitations of paper negatives, finicky but gorgeous direct positive paper, developing in chemistry with general disregard for the strictest controls of temperature and time, or developing film with a more environmentally friendly concoction of instant coffee, and, sometimes, intentionally destroying film. Some students worked purely digitally, others used 35mm and medium-format film cameras, while others still created mixed-media works with their photographs.

I asked the group to let go of the clean and perfect in favour of chance and exploration, and to enjoy the beauty of photographic processes, landscape representations, however complicated, and each other. I couldn’t be more thrilled with their work.

Please join us on November 27th for the public reception.

Risa Horowitz