Master long-exposure film photography
June 3, 2021
Long exposures can help encode the elements of time and emotion into a photo, as large-format film photographer David Fokos explains to Damien Demolder
‘Emotions are based in time,’ American photographer David Fokos says, ‘and for me to get emotions across in my pictures I need to somehow include the element of time. My pictures are all about emotions – I’m not trying to show people what a place looks like, but what it feels like to be there.’
We feel different about a place after a good long stare instead of a passing glance, and it is this sense of how it feels to look for a long time that David Fokos aims to capture in his images. He refers to it as ‘encoding time’ into his pictures.
IN A SMALL GALLERY on the second floor of Virginia’s Hampton University Museum hangs Henry Ossawa Tanner’s The Banjo Lesson. A young boy sits in the lap of his grandfather, learning to play the titular instrument, the pair surrounded by the evidence of life lived: clothes hung in the background, a loaf of bread and a white pitcher on a table, cooking pots at their feet. Color and shadow blend exquisitely to create a subtle glow that is cast onto the pair together at the fireside.Tanner is widely regarded as the most important Black American artist of the nineteenth century, and this 1893 oil
An Ansel Adams landscape is instantly recognizable to those who love photography.
The black and white mountains, moonrises, gnarled trees, rivers snaking through the land and streams of light puncturing puffy white clouds. Adams, who developed an affinity for nature at an early age, is one of our most well-known photographers. “Ansel Adams: Masterworks,” an exhibit featuring 48 of his photos from his portfolio “Museum Set,” will open Saturday at Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center at Colorado College. The show is open Thursdays-Saturdays by reservation and will be up through Sept. 4.
Adams, who died in 1984 at 82, began to consider his artistic legacy and body of work in 1979, sifting through 2,500 negatives to capture the images that most represented five decades of his career, from 1923-1969. That collection is known as the “Museum Set.”