I've just always loved the darkroom.
I've loved the process of getting your hands wet
and that magic of photography as the image
forms in the developer and that reaction
to chemistry and light.
So today, we're going to South San Francisco,
right on the edge of San Francisco Bay.
And we will be burning holes in photo paper
using the lens of my camera, documenting the arc of the sun
as it slowly rises.
The basic concept is I'm using the lens of the camera
much like you'd use a magnifying glass to burn a leaf.
I'm taking that principle and using a camera to do it.
The lens is the magnifying glass and instead of the dry leaf,
I have a piece of photographic black and white paper
inside the camera where the film usually would go.
And then I just do these long exposures of the sun,
and I burn pieces of paper.
The optics that I use are--a lot of them
are these military lenses, some of which are radioactive!
[laughs] And what they do is they're
exponentially brighter than traditional lenses for a view
camera.
So they just make the sun that much more intense.
Only certain kinds of paper will solarize in a way
where you can really see the landscape.
So most of my sun-based work is made
on vintage, old, black and white photographic paper.
And I'm opening these old boxes, and it's
like I'm connecting, in some way,
with the history of photography on a certain level.
A lot of times, I'm in the same spot from sunrise to sunset.
Today's exposure will only take about a couple hours.
And also, we're close to the equinox so the arc of the sun
is really going to be almost a 45-degree angle that's
straight.
There's not much curvature happening.
Because I'm dealing with silhouettes--
I'm photographing into the sun, so whatever's in front of me
is going to be backlit.
Have to use a horizon to explain where I am.
Each piece actually kind of has a time signature built into it.
You could, if you figured out where I was,
and you saw the position of the sun in relationship
to a mountain horizon, you would know roughly what time of year
that image was made.
By working on this project, it's kind of
made me reconsider your existence in the world.
You watch space being utilized and experienced
for really just small, short moments of time.
And in the meantime, the sun is just always rising and setting
and people are living their lives.
There's something about that element
of time in our existence and how we experience the planet.
It's fun to be kind of in a space in photography
where nobody's been there before.
Analog photography isn't dead.
There's places to go we haven't been.