In Camera

The images in the In Camera series are of photographic studios in Asia, the kind that have pretty much gone extinct; the painted backdrops are now by large digital prints or in Photoshop. What the old photo studios provided—and what the computer has supplanted-- was an environment where the past, the present, the traditional and the contemporary collided and where painted scenes and props gave clues into notions of class, taste and aspiration. The series builds on premises of traditional documentary photography but mixed with painterly and cinematic (implied narrative) additions. The panorama camera is perfect for this work in the way it compacts the world, widens it like Cinemascope yet flattens it to be read like a page of literature. The original prints were Cibachromes (a photographic form that’s also become extinct, another casualties of the digital age) as a way to duplicate the vibrancy and liveliness that the studio owners infused into their own work. Their studios were places where the mundane clutter of photo equipment, working in tandem with the buoyant paintings, made magic.