Kate Sweeney is a powerful voice in contemporary photography, who just so happens to live in my neck of the woods. She always brings so much to both sides of the camera. I’ve been fortunate to have collaborated with her a few times now, and it’s always a great time of swapping industry stories or talking about who has been inspiring us lately before moving on to making some new art of our own.
One of the inspirations that I shared with Kate was Zdzisław Beksiński, a Polish photographer and painter who was active from the 1950’s until the late nineties. One of my blog readers recently sent me a bunch of the late artists portraits and they really struck a chord with me. I bought a book of his photography and poured over the black and white portraits, street photography, and abstract still-lifes. They were simultaneously complex and simple, ominous and clever.
It made me reminisce about my early days in the craft, when hours sped past as I hunted for light and shadows and shapes and textures. I recalled the excitement that would build as I loaded the spent Tri-X onto a canister in the pitch-dark room. Time had seemed to almost stop as I agitated the bottle, washed and dried the negs, stretched them out over the light table, and decided which frames were worthy of the enlarger. Then everything seemed to speed up to double time as I’d pull out a number five Ilford filter (the highest contrast possible) and watch as the images swirled to life in the chemistry. To this day one of my favorite smells in the world is the combination of fixer and cigarettes on my fingers.
All this is to say that I really wanted to get back to that simplicity with this shoot. One light. Hard shadows. Shape studies. High contrast black and white. Really let the subject be the hero. It was my offering to the photo gods.
