I wanted a departure from the ordinary. I feel connected to the antiquity of the pictorialism era. I tried to replicate it and then I printed it. When I printed my work on cotton papers, I no longer saw a photography, but rather a print. Photography is a printing process. We may have been sidelined by snap shots, instamatic cameras, carousels of slides with someone's trip on them. There was a time when those who were discovering photography sought to make a print that had an artistic quality.
Soft focus in the modern world might be looked upon with a negative effect. In the world of selfies and phonetography, we want the instant. We try other things like HDR. All of it is good.
For me, the departure into another world stopped me from compositing all sorts of mania, but to look at the old stuff and wonder how I could make it mine in my era. The Pictorialists were impressionists. They wanted t replicate art, painted art. Soft focus might not initiallysell, but Impressionism is different. Now we're talking. It now becomes a genre in an event that takes us farther away from the cell phone immediacy. In those days, photographers, painters and printers made are. Photogrraphy was a print process.
Yes, I use modern papers. I use papers that replicate other things, including one hundred percent cotten. The end result is a print. It starts to leave photography and becomes a print.
I am fascinated.