Working with analogue photographs

Analogue is different to digital. You don’t get to see the photos till they are printed. You have to physically touch them and move them around with your hands to think them over.

I was thinking about landscape and found that I have taken a lot of photos of the standard “Canadian landscape” of mountains + sky.  Very pretty but very standard. Overly familiar. But what happens when you arrange them differently? Here they become a picture of a blue river, or a zigzag celestial stairway, or a ….  Or just an arrangement of green and blue.

Here on the top line we see two views of a town, reinterpreted as a Constructivist arrangement of lines and blocks. Interestingly this thing that came out so Constructivist are 4 photos taken in Russia. Left, Kronstadt; right, the Volga.

Below that, Canadian forest-scapes. These are less successful as compositions but they do erupt into an explosion of green life, which is interesting in its own way.

I did these in the studio, using old prints (ie. not ones I made specially for this exercise) and am pretty pleased with the results. It’s given me more incentive to keep working with analogue and to reconfigure the photos in this way. I quite happy with the top one and the Constructivist one on the left.

Some people really reject Conceptual photography, but I think that,  in a world that’s simply drowning in images, we can afford to find new ways to see them rather than just keeping making them.

Your feedback owould be welcomed.