Monochrome

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from 'Quadrants' 1975, by Ralph Gibson
    My post about the latest Leica M10 Monochrom and my current phase of taking [mostly] B&W images on the iPhone has made me think back on the artist who had more influence on me than most - Ralph Gibson. And the debate on whether photography can or cannot be considered 'Art' is long closed as far as I'm concerned.
    He broke pretty much every 'rule' of photography that was current. Not only in terms of his choice of subject, but in his framing and in his technical use of the medium. He abstracted from the world an internal, tonal geometry that to this day never ceases to make me draw breath at the beauty of his forms. He carved light, shade & deepest, flattest black from silver halide in as stark and elemental a way as Anish Kapoor manipulates light and form through the sculptural medium of pure pigment.
    His approach to the exposure and processing of film pretty much trashed 'good practice' and resulted in negatives so dense as to need extremely long exposures in the darkroom to extract the images buried in the dense tangle of an almost completely black frame of 35mm film. The photographs that resulted somehow seemed to take on that 'time'. The stillness and depth of the images emanate from the very chemical processes themselves; the instantaneous distilled into something painterly rather than [purely] facsimile.
    A life-long user of the Leica, he has in recent years gone digital - yes, with Leica still and for monochrome work (he also shoots colour,) he uses the Monochrom.
    As I mentioned in the Leica post, I would dearly love an M10 Mono, but only that lottery win would secure one - so for monochrome work, I use my iPhone 7 Plus with an app called Provoke, which aims to recreate the extreme B&W tone and noise that brutalised Kodak Tri-X film boiled in developer for too long produced. It was made to emulate the work of the Provoke magazine and photographers in Japan in the 1960's, and gives a sort of, kind of, film feel that I like and is of course, immediate and effectively free; but does inevitably lose out on the mystery and alchemy of dredging an image out of blackness onto paper in the darkroom, but there you go - I might just start proper printing again if this lockdown is going to be long term. Not a bad thing. More on Provoke later. And a lot of others...

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