The Private Matters portfolio housing 10 silver gelatin fibre based warm tone prints. Each hand printed by the photographer, Michael Humphrey.
I'm as enthusiastic about analogue photography today as I was when I first looked through the viewfinder of my Pentax K1000 over twenty years ago, exposed my first roll and later developed it by hand.
It's all those pleasing little rituals that create the habits, from feeding the film onto a fresh spool and cranking the winder to advance it to its first frame. It is the process of learning to master the camera so that it doesn't control you. To just describe it as simply “real” does it a huge disservice because, technically speaking, digital is just as “real”. Although one could argue the case that its birth through the screen means it can only live within the screen. Therefore residing within its sphere of perfect virtual reality, where upon it imprisons itself as a copy of photography personified. Personally, I think that digital does not translate well into print at all. Fundamentally it is too perfect, and there is something to be said about the human eye, that quite rightly, distrusts perfection. Primarily, perfection is a lie, it cheats and deceives the viewer through a collaborative dance of ultra sharp lines and edges that our eyes are unable to render and see in the natural world. Truth is art and art is entwined with life through a beauty that ultimately unites.
Fibre based silver gelatin warm tone print from the Private Matters portfolio.
Digital photography allows anybody to manipulate or edit its original idea or design. It is the greatest piece of collaborative performance art, where by armies of trained office professionals conduct data analysis on the pixel paths to plot a perfect trajectory of maximum viewer satisfaction and monetary gain. Essentially to tell a photographer what they can and can not photograph, how they can photograph it, when and where, is against independent creative freewill.
In my world, nobody tells me what I can or can not photograph, except for my wife, whose enigmatic female eye counteracts my own. From the light of the camera to the darkness of the darkroom, my vision as a photographer is singular and that is why I believe private matters, matter.
Mounted fibre based warm tone silver gelatin print housed in the Private Matters portfolio.