Taking Away the Camera

to get closer to creating the image

By David Luttrell

May 28^th, 2016

Changing Direction

A little over a year ago I decided to shake things up a bit with my photography. Watching the explosion of camera phones and before that the digital transition from analog, it was easy to see that more people would explore photography than ever before. And like always there would be people pushing boundaries and exploring different ways to express themselves. I’m probably not the only person who has wondered how some of the greats from the past would have embraced digital and social media. Irving Penn or Avedon’s Snapchat, Diane Arbus’ IG feed, Robert Frank or Eugene Smith’s posts on FB all might be interesting but would they do it? Maybe, maybe not……but it is fun to speculate. That being said, there are millions of images being taken every day, probably every minute. It has become as commonplace as breathing. We can now witness fantastic and mundane slices of time and life from all over the world (and in space) 24/7. Its a bit overwhelming to say the least and certainly exciting when those boundaries do get pushed.

Having started this journey many years ago with the larger cameras, I began to miss the precision and the quality of 4x5 and 5x7 sheet film, not to mention the challenge of composing upside down and backwards. But to be honest, the thought of setting up a darkroom basically from scratch has no appeal. I can say I have been swayed by the siren song of digital. So my change involves digital but incorporates that precision and quality of a large format camera and that compositional challenge with a twist.

These images are the product of that effort. They are collected and found objects and flora from our un-manicured gardens. Working without benefit of an aperture my exposures can be as long as 30 minutes and these digital photograms present their own unique process of visualization.