Commercial Guy Still Using Film

[mark l]

mark l wrote:
art with a capital F.


"Flattering to see that that term has spread so far and wide.Good light,"

Sorry, did you think you invented that expression? I've only been using it for 35 years, in five countries, thought it was common as muck.

Still, if your flattered I suppose that's a good thing!

[Maris]

Me - I am an UN-retired commercial photographer using only black and white silver gelatine materials
John

I admire your trajectory and wonder at the parallels with my own experience. I went:

1977 no more colour photography.....except for commercial work.
1995 large format 8x10 only.....except for commercial work.
1999 no more commercial work.
2006 moved house and became a full time gelatin-silver photograph maker.

I do photography every day; exposing film, doing darkroom work, scouting locations, testing materials, making lenses, etc, etc. But I have set aside commerce in favour of exploring those aspects of photography that are too expensive, too onerous, too time consuming, to fit into a properly audited commercial context. For years I scrimped and saved (play them heart-string violins) and then had a few lucky breaks. Now I can buy and use any camera, any lens, any material without practical limitation. It sounds like a photographer's fantasy but it isn't. The real limitations aren't gadgets. As always it's talent, imagination, vision, creativity, and energy that sets the boundaries.

Your commemts in another post concerning the Perth Centre for Photography strike a chord with me. Up here there is the Queensland Centre for Photography and in my visits there I have never seen a guide as to what I should do next; unless it's 2 metre by 1 metre inkjets with a high meaninglessness per square metre quotient. The place is not referred to as the art's-hole of Brisbane for nothing.

[mark l]

Second you comments about the Queensland centre of photography-utterly hopeless. Mind you The Photographers Gallery in London went that way thirty years ago, and that was before digital-they decided mixed media and conceptual art were the way to go, I dropped my membership, wrote an abusive yet constructive letter and gave up on them. I had several photographs exhibited in the Australian Centre For Photography in 1975 in Paddington, Sydney, in a show of up and coming australian photographers, loved the place then, I don't even bother to look in these days, utter dross. Mind you The Stills Gallery around the corner can be worth a visit.