Pro Talk: Pen Densham – World in Motion
“But again, I thought, well, is this stupid? And I would show my images to people and they say, no, that’s kind of cool, and I started to believe in them. Abstract art doesn’t have a confirmational process, it’s actually so personal. So since then I’ve been on a 17-year journey of letting go of everything I was taught, and trying to find how I could get people to a place where they could feel what nature is through photography. And I use long exposures. I use weird exposures. I will move the camera, or sometimes I’ll let the cameras be static and I’ll use a very long exposure. I’ll do anything I need to do to reach the end point that I’m looking for.”
Selecting the image
The next thing Pen discovered was that the process of selecting the right image to work with was almost as big a challenge as seeing a potential situation in the first place. The scenes he was focusing on were transient and changeable, and having the eye to separate the shots that worked from those that weren’t so successful was something of a fine art.
“Everything was so experimental,” he says, “and I don’t always immediately recognise what is beautiful. I have to process them in my head to see if they ultimately speak to me. It reminds me at times of the Inuit and Native American art that I collect. The Inuit say that they don’t carve something and force it, rather they release the animal or the spirit that’s inside whatever they’re working with, and that’s what I’m doing with my photography.
“The other thing is that my images are very much as they leave the camera. I wouldn’t know how to use Photoshop, it scares the life out of me, so I use Apple photo plugins instead since I’m so analogue in my thinking. I can employ some noise reduction, I can play with the contrast and change the saturation, but that’s about it.
“What I’m doing is trying to discover the poetry in the image and to bring it out. It’s the same headspace as writing in a way: when you go into a trance to write, I go into this trance to discover my photography, to take it to a place where it feels right. When I reach that point I choke up, I literally get emotional. The I’ll leave it and will look at it again two or three days later, and at that point I can be profoundly shocked by how cool they are, how vibrant and special they feel. And I never in my life thought I would be able to do that, and I’ve been so excited by the whole process.”
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