Color Separation

When I was in college, I had a hard time affording large format color film. While I appreciated the “rarified” feeling of shooting on finite physical film stock rather than limitless digital photos, I was constrained to what I could afford and develop by hand in the school’s darkroom.

With a strong desire to photograph in color, I remembered a process I had read about for color “separation” pioneered by a Russian photographer in the early 1900s named Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky. Although chemical and film manufacturing had long since eclipsed the need for this esoteric process, I was interested in its potential for creating tidy color images using only black and white film.

With some experimentation, it was clear that with enough process and time spent in post-processing (just think, three negatives creates three times as much dust to edit it) I could eventually make the process “disappear”, leaving behind only a color image. What quickly became more interesting, however, was the potential to exploit the unique flaws of the process in order to create new, colorful imagery.

Landscape Intervention

Sounds a bit better than “playing in the woods”, doesn’t it?

Insofar as I am interested in unoccupied spaces or found environments that humans have created or altered, I have often made my own small “interventions” on the environment. Sometimes they are only meant for the camera and then are packed up or discarded. Sometimes they stay there until nature or someone else intervenes. But, they are recorded and stick around for me to look back at. They have never quite coalesced into any larger body of work or major series, but I like to keep them around. It’s fun to play in the woods.

The End of the World