Safelight

“Anyone who has studied the history of technology knows that technological change is always a Faustian bargain: Technology giveth and technology taketh away, and not always in equal measure. A new technology sometimes creates more than it destroys. Sometimes, it destroys more than it creates. But it is never one-sided.” 

Neil Postman, 1990. 

I have worked as a Lecturer since 2000. For the last few years I have had to explain film grain to students by comparing it to pixels in a digital image rather than the other way around. For me this marked a changing of the guard, this is the first generation of young adults to have only known digital photography.Thresholds between opposites is a repeated theme in my work, As a continuation of these ideas I am creating a body of work around the transition from chemical to digital photography. Safelight is a series of long exposure portraits all made under safelights in a college darkroom. The subjects are all young people studying photography looking back at their tutor the photographer.