Bill Armstrong photographs from the infinity series

I came across Bill Armstrong in a round about way that doesn’t warrant explaining but it does highlight that there is so much more out there than we can ever know. His work is all about colour, almost nothing else, although there are things going on in his pictures it is the colour that makes the difference.

His work definitely falls into the bracket of

“One photo out of focus is a mistake, ten photos out of focus are an experimentation, one hundred photo out of focus are a style.”

 

 

this is what he says about The Infinity Series

The Infinity series is an extensive body of work that I have been photographing since 1997. It includes a wide range of portfolios, from figurative to abstract, that are made using my unique process of photographing found images extremely out of focus with the camera’s focusing ring set at infinity.

My unique process of appropriating images and subjecting them to a series of manipulations—photocopying, cutting, painting, re-photographing—transforms the originals and gives them a new meaning in a new context.  Extreme blurring makes the edges within the collages disappear, so the photographs appear to be seamless, integrated images. This sleight of hand allows me to conjure a mysterious tromp l’oeil world that hovers between the real and the fantastic. It is a world just beyond our grasp, where place may be suggested, but is never defined, and where the identity of the amorphous figures remains in question.  It is a world that might exist in memory, in dreams, or, perhaps, in a parallel universe yet unvisited. 

The nature of visual perception intrigues me: how the eye continually tries to resolve these images, but is unable to do so, and how that is unsettling.  And I am drawn to the idea that we can believe something is real, while at the same time knowing it is illusory; that the experience of visual confusion, when the psyche is momentarily derailed, is what frees us to respond emotionally. 

At the same time, the subject of these collages is color.  Extreme de-focusing enables me to blend and distill hues, creating rhapsodies of color that are meditative pieces—glimpses into a space of pure color, beyond our focus, beyond our ken.

You will have either hated or loved these images, I doubt there is a halfway house, as a photographer you either want pictures to represent things, objects, moments in time or you want your pictures to hint at atmosphere, emotion and thoughts.

Bill Armstrong is running a workshop at The Photographers Gallery on 25th April, here is a link to the rather sparse information

 

4 ways to get a studio look without a photo studio

On our Portrait photography course we spend a lot of time explaining about light, how to use daylight rather than needing to invest in some form of studio lighting. Remember how we all thought digital photography was going to be free once you owned a camera? This article via Digital Camera World offers another way to set up a home studio and in general everything here is valid and the advice would help you to be a better studio, portrait or still life photographer.

Few amateur photographers can afford the luxury of a dedicated studio, but that doesn’t mean that you can’t take top-quality images that look like they were taken in a studio. In their latest guest post the team at Photoventure show you  how…

Magnum and the Dying Art of Darkroom Printing

There is a very interesting blog called the literate lens and it honestly does what it says, it is wonderfully literate, well written, engaged and precise and not about the general stuff you see on every other photography blog. This article on wet processing (darkroom printing) and Magnum, the world famous photography agency. The article is by sarahjcoleman

A few years ago, I had the pleasure of spending some time with Pablo Inirio, master darkroom printer at  Magnum Photos in New York. I was thinking about that interview recently as I heard the news of Kodak’s bankruptcy and pondered the precarious status of “old media” like books, film and silver gelatin prints.

As Magnum’s printer, Inirio gets to work with some of photography’s most iconic images. In his small darkroom, the prints lying casually around include Dennis Stock’s famous portrait of James Dean in Times Square (right) and a cigar-chewing Che Guevara shot by Rene Burri. Intricate squiggles and numbers are scrawled all over the prints, showing Inirio’s complex formulas for printing them. A few seconds of dodging here, some burning-in there. Will six seconds be enough to bring out some definition in the building behind Dean? Perhaps, depending on the temperature of the chemicals…….I was curious to see how the last few years of digital progress have affected things at Magnum, so I checked in with Inirio by phone this week. He was still there, bubbling with the good cheer that, along with his darkroom skills, have made him a favorite with Magnum photographers. In the three years since we met, he said, surprisingly little has changed at Magnum. He had to switch to Ilford paper when Agfa closed, and he hopes Kodak doesn’t take his stop bath away—but otherwise, things are the same……

Magnum has been digitizing its archive, but so far, Inirio hasn’t been tempted to transfer his skills to the digital realm. “Digital prints have their own kind of look, and it’s fine, but fiber prints have such richness and depth,” he said.  He thinks darkroom printing will always be with us—after all, he pointed out, “people are still doing daguerrotypes.”

Read the rest of this interesting article here