127 Day January 2018

Baby Box Tengor with Ilford HP5 Plus

I shot just one roll of film in the Baby Box Tengor for last weekend's 127 Day. The camera still had the yellow filter taped inside the body from last Summer's 127 Day, which I left in place, although given the weather conditions on the day, the film might have benefitted from its removal. I used Ilford HP5 Plus cut down from medium format, and rolled with some old Kodak 127 paper. A number of the frames suffered from light leaks at the sides, which I think were due as much to the film not being sufficiently tightly rolled with the backing paper than any problems with the Baby Box Tengor. In development, I gave the film a one-stop push to compensate for the yellow filter and overcast lighting.

'Documents' Group Show

I am showing two small prints in the Documents group exhibition opening in London this Friday, made using traditional photographic processes, falling within the remit of this blog, as does some of the other work in the show.

Private View: 26th January 7-9pm, exhibition continues 27th-28th January, 12-5pm
Lumen Studios, The Crypt, St John, 200 Cambridge Heath Road, Bethnal Green, London E2 9PA

From the press release:

Contemporary art and also literature have a predilection for documents of all sorts: photographic records, archives, official pieces of paper. Documents provide information but also trigger a poetics of cool memories as well as a form of fiction. This group show curated by Melanie King, Félicie Kertudo and Laura Vallés reflects on the tensions between the representable and the un-representable, celebrates the artifice of image-making, and explores how environments shape and are shaped by inhabitants and events. It also emerges from the RCA’s homonymous research group and considers works from disciplines outside of art, such as ethnography and urbanism. The document is non subjective or expressive, and yet it does not succeed in being objective either. It is in the sense of an objective fiction that artists endeavour to expand, discuss and practice a poetics of the document that call into question received ideas, and hopefully produce new ones.

Main image: Armelle Skatulski