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Where am I from?During this strange and uncertain time, I had the chance to lose and find myself, again.
THE IDEA Looking for some inspiration on Instagram, I found a nice initiative of the London alternative photography called the london’ Soustenible darkroom, that was doing a Sustainable Darkroom digital residency. The artists were all working together, looking for different and sustainable processes to print, develop films, images and revisit the old darkroom techniques, all to be supportive for the earth, without the use of chemists. Discovering this magical world I decided to try some of the Caffenol recipes that I had already heard about, but until now I haven't had the opportunity to experiment. THE INSTRUMENT AND TECHNIQUE Without a photographic enlarger and red safelight, I could count just on negatives and photographic paper. In the beginning, I did some contact prints from digital negatives, but it wasn't enough, so I chose to build a photographic enlarger from the pizza cardboards. It took time to make it works, figuring out, little by little, the necessary steps to achieve the exposing of paper. It wasn't easy to find the light source and to make the projection uniform, in this way pictures didn't get vignetted. Several issues occurred as the control of the development was exhausting quickly, so to achieve acceptable results, I had to try several recipes found on the internet. The enlarger mounts a 35mm analogue lens has two spaces, one of them for the contrast filters and the other negative carrier and the light source is a 75w enlarger lamp. I didn't have a story to print, I didn't know what to say and how to say it. I wanted to highlight the technique and the irregularity of the tool created by me and the unpredictable developer that I used. Images are all printed on Ilford multigrade FB classic matt paper, with basic darkroom techniques such as dodging and burning. Some of the shapes and dolls were made with the kitchen foil and then printed on contact. Mysterious textures arise from scraps of emulsified fabrics that I inserted in the negative carrier and the other pictures are printed from 6x6 and 3x4.5 negatives. THE MEANING Where am I from? This idea came from my vision of our life on earth. Why are we here? How did we get here? During this pandemic, I wished to analyse this important question that everyone wondered about themselves at least once in life. |
