From the vestiges of my decades-long practice as a portrait photographer, my work has evolved into narrative photography using vintage printing techniques. Along the way, my research led me to pursuing the ultimate photographic lifecycle: conceiving, staging, developing, and printing the image myself to retain full chain of command in creative expression and output.
I have established a long, complex process leading to the final, narrative image. It begins with selecting geographic locations, photographing backgrounds (e.g. landscapes, city scapes, etc.), and finding models to improvise a performance. On a given day, the choice of scene is both instinctual and deliberate. With a film camera in hand, and an idea of the mood I want to capture, I immerse myself in the location. While creating evocative sets, I am also working on developing the characters for a particular narrative. Once I have decided on a model, I make a rough sketch in my journal, which serves as a kind of story-map to guide the actual photoshoot, captured on film, in the studio.
After developing the film, I digitally scan the images into my computer so that I can create a surreal montage based on the landscape and characters I have chosen narratively compose. Lastly, I produce a digital negative on acetate and subject it to contacting printing after mixing and coating archival paper by hand with an emulsion of platinum and palladium salts. The contact print is made by placing the digital negative into the hand-coated paper and exposing it to ultraviolet light for an extended amount of time.
Although this is a costly and time-consuming production process requiring meticulous attention to detail, this approach offers enormous flexibility to adapt both process and performance in real time. By using traditional vintage contact printing techniques along with image editing technology, I am able to layer the real and the imaginative to produce a singular image once the elements make their way into the computer.