Category Archives: Photography

Future of Photography Q&A No.11 – Jeff Curto

by John Carvill

Oomska’s ‘Future of Photography’ Series continues…

We presented our interviewees with a set list of questions, and left the matter of in what format and at what length they should answer entirely up to them. Here are Jeff Curto’s responses.

1. How and when did you first become interested in photography? What was the trigger which led you to take a serious interest? How different would that trigger be now, with all the changes – technological and otherwise – in photography during the intervening years?

When I was 8 years old, I caught my first real fish. Rather than the little stream trout I was used to catching and tossing back, this was an 8-pound Northern Pike, a hideously ugly thing that was, to my young eyes, the most magnificent creature I’d ever seen. To mark the occasion, my father wanted to take a picture of me with my fish. He told me to hold it way out in front of me so it would, as he put it, “look like a monster in the picture; wait till you see it!” Sure enough, when the snapshots came back from the camera shop, the combination of my dad’s camera technique and my pose had made that 14-inch Northern look just about as big as I did.

It was with that picture that I began to realize that a photograph (and the way it was made) could be a lot more complex than I had ever suspected before. When I started making my own photographs a short while later, my life changed in the same way that falling in love with any one or any thing can change a person.

Because the “trigger” for my interest in photography was something that is what I would call “universally photographic”, it’s unlikely that the changes in photography over the last several decades would change anything about the way my trigger works. I’m still fascinated by the way photography sees the world and how that way is different from the way our eyes see it.

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Future of Photography Q&A No.10 – Peter Marshall

by John Carvill

Oomska’s ‘Future of Photography’ Series continues…

We presented our interviewees with a set list of questions, and left the matter of in what format and at what length they should answer entirely up to them. Here are Peter marshall’s responses.

1. How and when did you first become interested in photography? What was the trigger which led you to take a serious interest? How different would that trigger be now, with all the changes – technological and otherwise – in photography during the intervening years?

When I was a small kid around 1950 a we got a stack of old National Geographics from the 1930s passed on to us when a rather wealthier relative died. We used to spend hours looking at the pictures and decided I wanted to be a photographer. At 9 or 10 I was given a cheap plastic Brownie camera one Christmas by my oldest brother, a keen but very amateur photographer, and I was very disappointed when I took the film out of the back to find no pictures on it – with digital I would have been spared that disappointment! More seriously, I grew up virtually without money in a home where a film in the family camera had to do for at least two year’s annual holiday (they did get a dozen exposures after all) and that Brownie had been played with until it fell to pieces long before I could afford to make an actual picture. It was only in my mid-twenties when I got a real job that I could afford to take up photography properly.

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Future of Photography Q&A No.9 – Nick Turpin

by John Carvill

Oomska’s ‘Future of Photography’ Series continues…

We presented our interviewees with a set list of questions, and left the matter of in what format and at what length they should answer entirely up to them. Here are Nick Turpin’s responses.

1. How and when did you first become interested in photography? What was the trigger which led you to take a serious interest? How different would that trigger be now, with all the changes – technological and otherwise – in photography during the intervening years?

My father introduced me to photography when I was a teenager, still at school, he built a darkroom for me in our second toilet at home. I went on to specialise in photography on my foundation course for a year then moved to London to do a BA in Photography, Film and Video at The University of Westminster. In my second year I shot two black and white stories, one about children with Leukaemia living around the Nuclear Reprocessing Plant at Sellafield in Cumbria and one about the closure of the coal mine in the village of Aberfan in South Wales where a generation of children was lost in a landslide in 1966. I showed this work to the Picture Editor of the Independent Newspaper and ended up quitting my course to be a press photographer, I was 20 and had been taking pictures for just three and half years.

So my entry into professional photography was extremely rapid, I didn’t even really have time to think about what I wanted to do with the medium until much later. In a way I was working as a photographer daily for a number of years before I really discovered and came to understand it’s unique quality and power. It was when I eventually understood what photography could do that I left the Independent Newspaper in order to pursue it, that was seven years later.

‘Fallen Man, Paris, France 1967′ by Joel Meyerowitz is a photograph that I saw first in the college library and then later in the Street Photography book ‘Bystander’, this picture was enormously significant for me because it was the most extraordinary frozen moment of life and showed me how ‘revelatory’ the process of photographing could be. How could you even begin to set out to take a photograph like that? It was so exciting, I knew that was the kind of picture I wanted to make and I knew if I did, I would be working right in the sweet spot of the medium, utilising exactly what the camera does best.

Many lament the passing of film and criticise the digital camera but for me this is nostalgic nonsense, the digital camera is an enormous bonus for Street Photographers like myself who can pursue elusive moments endlessly with little real cost. I shoot a lot and I like to work that way, it allows for wonderful accidents and unique ‘untakeable’ photographs.

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Future of Photography Q&A No.8 – Emma Jay

by John Carvill

Oomska’s ‘Future of Photography’ Series continues…

We presented our interviewees with a set list of questions, and left the matter of in what format and at what length they should answer entirely up to them. Here are Emma Jay’s responses.

1. How and when did you first become interested in photography? What was the trigger which led you to take a serious interest? How different would that trigger be now, with all the changes – technological and otherwise – in photography during the intervening years?

I think I was about 6 or 7 years old when I started to be fascinated by photographs. There wasn’t any particular trigger, more that I was a “watcher” as a child. I would observe. I still do that. It wasn’t until I was at University that I took a serious interest – buying a good camera and experimenting in the dark room.

2. Photography is often described as a mixture of art and science. It’s also a medium. How has digital technology altered the way these elements combine to produce what we think of as ‘photography’? Has technology altered that balance?

I’m not so sure about this. One can alter an image digitally, but you still need an ‘eye’ for an image initially. Digital technology has made photography more accessible to people, but I don’t think it has made them all artists.

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Future of Photography Q&A No.7 – Tamara Bogolasky

by John Carvill

Oomska’s ‘Future of Photography’ Series continues…

We presented our interviewees with a set list of questions, and left the matter of in what format and at what length they should answer entirely up to them. Here are Tamara Bogolasky’s responses.

1. How and when did you first become interested in photography? What was the trigger which led you to take a serious interest? How different would that trigger be now, with all the changes – technological and otherwise – in photography during the intervening years?

I first got interested in photography when I was about 12 years old and I found my father’s old Canon AE-1 camera and I became obsessed with learning how to use it. I thought it was really cool to develop your own pictures and the darkroom became my favorite place.

I feel the trigger would be completely different now with most people learning from digital cameras and not even printing the pictures most of the time. I feel like now, people take pictures for the instant gratification and rarely go back and see what they took a month ago.

2. Photography is often described as a mixture of art and science. It’s also a medium. How has digital technology altered the way these elements combine to produce what we think of as ‘photography’? Has technology altered that balance?

Photography will always remain a mixture between art and science, no matter how technology advances, the principles remain the same and there is still science in the process. Besides, technology and science go hand in hand so maybe now photography has become a more complex mixture of art, science and technology.

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