Kyle Ford

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Every so often, you meet someone in a way that could only be described as serendipitous. Such was the case when we traveled to SCAD Lacoste and met photography professor Kyle Ford, a fine-art photographer who normally is based at the SCAD Hong Kong campus, but just so happened to be teaching the summer session photography classes at SCAD Lacoste.

As we know well, I love talking to other photographers…it’s always such a pleasure and honor to engage with people about their passions, especially when it’s in a field that I know and love myself.  So it wasn’t long before Kyle and I were planning a photo adventure in a Provençal vineyard and closing the night at a spectacular restaurant with our conversation about his path to photography, why he chooses film, and the research and thought behind the work he creates now…

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What was your first photograph?

I was seven years old, and there was a competition I think my mother encouraged me to participate in. She was a painter, an artist, and perhaps she was hoping I would draw something or paint something, but I ended up photographing something. It was a tree. I photographed what I thought was a ghost, and I thought that was great as a seven-year-old…it was really my breath in front of the camera.

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Old School Photography

I do a lot of personal projects throughout the year to satisfy my curiosity in photography and art, my need to create and continue to explore as a photographer. My personal work makes my professional photos better and my professional work pushes my personal; they are like opposite ends of a magnet always reacting to each other. Our Ann Street Studio holiday card is one of the personal projects I most look forward to every year. I like that it takes place over a multitude of cities (New York, Boston and Savannah), I like that it takes a really long time to create, I like that the entire thing is done by hand, by my hands, I like that there is nothing digital about the process and I like that in the end, we send it out as a true artifact you can hold and that will be there for years to come.

This year’s print starting unknowingly on the beaches of Montauk, during an autumn walk that presented our little artifacts, moon shells washed up on the shore: all of them different sizes, colors, tonality, some with nicks and scratches. It reminded me of how we are all different but beautiful…and though this year has had so many ups, we all face the downs and the scars left on our shells from the beating currents of time should be celebrated – for without them, we must not truly be living.

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We brought them back to the house we share with our friends in Amagansett to be photographed on Ilford Delta 100 black and white film.

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Continue reading “Old School Photography”

Old School Photography

Much of what we do at Ann Street Studio is with digital technology and I do love digital. I think it’s important to know the newest technology because that will forever shape how we shoot and see tomorrow. However, I was not raised on digital, but on the slow pace of film… the time it takes to load it and think about your exposure, never knowing if you got the shot until hours or days later. For our studio holiday card this year I wanted to step back, slow down, and enjoy the process of photography. It was amazing how much longer everything took, such a contrast to the enormous amount of content we can quickly produce these days.

We wanted to print an edition of 200 and started with the concept of shooting a simple still life of peonies to represent romance: the romance of mine and Kevin’s marriage this year. I went down to the Chelsea flower market and bought a variety of options.

It took 6 me hours to photograph 20 plates of 4×5 film.

Each sheet of film is carefully processed in pitch-black rooms with large dipping tanks. We then reviewed the contacts sheets of the film to choose our select for printing. I used red and green filters on the flowers when photographing to lighten and darken the greens and reds of the image and add more tonality to the end black and white product.

My favorite photo lab to use is actually LaPete in Boston. It’s large, clean, quiet and Bill (the owner) is an encyclopedia of photography and old school techniques. I go there partly to pick his brain.

30 sec exposure to light on warm toned fiber base paper, 2 mins in developer, 30 secs in stop bath (stops development), 5 mins in fixer (makes it not light sensitive), 30 mins in wash baths. It took two full days of printing to produce the 200 prints.

Using fiber based paper is a longer drying process than RC; each print was dried and pressed in 3 different machines, then cooled under weighted glass to flatten the print.

We headed down to Savannah and spent three days in Gallery Espresso spot toning each image by hand, since dust spots sometimes occur in the printing process. Signed, dated, and numbered – then sent for shipping.

It was, for me, like taking a deep breath. Although we always strive to create the best work we can possible create, I had an overwhelming since of pride looking at the photograph after all the time and detail and days it took to create it.

“Flower #7”, 2012