The September issue of Rangefinder Magazine has a feature of Rocky Schenck and the complete range of his visual accomplishments. Schenck is known for his moody and visually-innovative music videos, and his homage photographs in the style of 1930s Hollywood glamour portraits. His still work is shot on film with a Mamiya RZ67.
PDF download of Rangefinder’s Schenck profile.
“Ever since I was young, I knew in my heart I would be an artist of some sort,” states photographer Ervine Lin. Unfortunately, the educational system in Singapore tended to frown upon students who chose to study art during Ervine’s youth, “leaving only the less academically inclined students to pursue it,” he says. Ervine was whisked away into science-related courses with other academically-gifted students. The closest he could come to art was becoming an architectural major, which proved to be an unhappy pairing.
©Ervine Lin
Taking a year off from his studies, Ervine and a friend opened a photography studio. His friend quickly left the business, leaving the neophyte photographer with the studio and the rent to pay. Ervine found himself a professional photographer with professional responsibilities very quickly. Fortunately, commercial clients appeared, and Ervine began his autodidactic journey as a photographer.
©Ervine Lin
When asked about his impressive blend of lighting and saturation, Ervine claims to have a split personality when it comes to work for clients and work for himself. He will do anything required to get what clients are paying him for, including total image manipulation with his formidable Photoshop skills. His personal photographs get very little digital tweaking, if any. Most are scanned directly from slide or negatives. Sometimes there’s dust removal, cropping, and maybe a small amount of dodging and burning. “Most of the saturation that you see comes from the slides I use,” he says. “If you thought the photos online were saturated, wait until you look at the some of the slides under a loupe!”
©Ervine Lin
Although his black and white photos often exhibit a wide dynamic range of luminosity, Ervine professes to not work hard to get this effect with his Mamiya gear. “While I often bring my Sekonic with me, there are times when I’d rather skip the whole zone metering and just let the camera do its work in AE mode,” he says. “I’m using a Mamiya 6, (a forerunner of the popular Mamiya 7 II) and it’s metering is done through the viewfinder. Film latitude on black and white negatives is just so broad that it’s really quite hard to go drastically wrong.” For color work, he shoots Kodak VS100 and Fuji Provia 400F. His black and white films are Fujifilm Neopan Acros 100 and Neopan 400, and everything is scanned with an Epson Perfection V700. He shoots with strobes for his professional work, but his personal photos are done with available light only. When necessary, he utilizes a Sekonic 758 meter. “One of the biggest plus points about the Sekonic is its ability to average out a number of meter readings. This really speeds things up for me when I need to move fast but still meter with a spot meter.”
©Ervine Lin
Completely self-taught in the art and science of photography, Ervine switched from the Mamiya RB67 to the Mamiya 6 Rangefinder. The reason for the switch was ease of portability in the field, as most of his personal photographs are done in foreign countries. Of the Mamiya 6, he reports, “It’s shutter is so slient you can hardly tell it went off.” He shoots the 50, 75, and 150mm lenses. “All three lenses are superb and pretty much ideal for the work I do. They tack sharp even when wide open.”
©Ervine Lin
Ervine has written about how digital photos appear too clean for him, and film seems “more authentic.” When asked if this is something to do with medium format film, he replies, “Not just medium format film. Polaroids, 35mm, 8×10′s, et cetera, all have this wonderfully beautiful look. Anything shot on film looks more down to earth, more humane, more alive, even. There’s the fact that when you tell people you shot a photograph on film, it helps to give you a bit more credibility as a photographer.”
©Ervine Lin
When viewing the gorgeous tonality evident throughout his work in exotic locations from Australia to China to Bali, it’s clear Ervine Lin made the right choice. He is definitely an artist, and was wise to listen to the voice which spoke to him in his childhood. With his sights set on moving from commercial photography to more personal work and possibly opening a gallery, Ervine says, “I love making nice images for no other reason than making nice images. There’s nobody to answer to, no lists of deliverables and deadlines to meet, no invoices and quotations to write, and so on — just taking photographs for the love of photography and nothing else. Again I boil this down to my photographic split personality. In the future, if the time and opportunity arose for me to earn a decent living with my personal work, I would make the switch in an instant.” Although his commercial clients would disagree, we look forward to more stunning personal work by Ervine Lin, and wish him the best in continuing to make his artistic dreams a reality.
©Ervine Lin
Ervine Lin Photography: http://www.ervinelin.com
Written by Ron Egatz
Somewhere in London, Paris Seawell is shooting film with his Mamiya, and the world is fortunate for that. Although he paints, creates sculpture, and has made a few short movies (such as This Place) his black and white photography is where his most accomplished artistic vision shines.
© Paris Seawell
Seawell’s series entitled Semblance is a unique vision of distorting the human body with seemingly random but highly controlled projections onto his model, Agata Rybicka. The results range from the horrifying to the sublime, but always remain fascinating and undeniable. Semblance harkens back to André Kertész’s groundbreaking series Distortions, but Seawell doesn’t bend the body’s form with light—he projects a series of images onto it. A fingerprint, marker jottings, splashes, and the initial letters of the four DNA nitrogenous bases (G, C, T and A) are source materials for these projections. His goals are not only to get us to view the body differently, but to think.
© Paris Seawell
Seawell considers himself an artist first and a photographer second, and this makes perfect sense. “To me, large parts of photography are about creating a frame of reference. This is a way of showing people how you think, and in turn, being able to compare that to how other people think,” Seawell says of his vision. Although he does shoot in color, he is more interested in working with shape, tone, form and texture at this time. People and their skin textures in particular are his primary inspiration and subject matter.
© Paris Seawell
Proof of Life is about viewing the body differently, also, although the subjects are not manipulated with props. Scarred bodies themselves are the subjects, yet he consciously works to remove emotion from these photos. This series, he states, has more meaning than Semblance. “There’s more context, thought and philosophy around Proof of Life.” Originally conceived as an antidote to Robert Mapplethorpe’s perfect human forms, Seawell explains, “I don’t want to find the flaw or scar on a perfect body. I wanted to find the perfection in the flaw, and how the flaw can be beautiful.” Pointing to Jeffrey Silverthorne’s morgue photographs, Seawell strives for both stillness and mystery in these images. He’s not striving for romantic images and provides no backstory on his subjects and their wounds. This growing collection currently features an accident victim, an emergency surgery patient, a skin disease sufferer, and a self-harm patient. Other subjects are on the way, including a man aged 55. “These bodies are objects. Bodies are just things. I’m not objectifying the models, but showing the beauty of what and who they are.”
© Paris Seawell
© Paris Seawell
His frankness continues through to the equipment he uses and the photographic process he’s developed. Originally working with a digital SLR, Seawell quickly had a change of heart. “I got bored. It was too easy. I wasn’t learning anything about photography. It was shallow. When I found the Mamiya, it saved photography for me. It breathed life back into the process. It sounds stupid, but it was magic. I was shooting and I thought ‘this is how photography should be.’ I felt like a rockstar—like Avedon shooting Monroe or Leibovitz shooting Lennon. It’s not just nostalgia. A good comparison would be stairs and escalators to film and digital. People will always want to walk at their own pace, as opposed to having the work done for them.” There’s a tactile satisfaction Seawell reports with his Mamiya 645 1000s. “There’s the whirring of the winder and the clunk of the shutter. It’s brilliant. The mechanicalness of it makes you feel you’re accomplishing something.” Currently shooting with an original Mamiya 80mm lens, Seawell eventually wants to acquire a 645 AFD III.
© Paris Seawell
© Paris Seawell
Although the projections and scars may change, Paris Seawell can be counted on for his continuing vision of the uncommon and unspoken. An artist unafraid to show what is typically hidden both inside and out, Seawell plans on bringing us more images of the same. Viewers, no doubt, will continue to attempt to put their own stories to them and roam where Seawell’s textures may lead their eyes.
Paris Seawell: http://www.paris-seawell.com/
Paris Seawell on Twitter: http://twitter.com/paris_seawell
Written by Ron Egatz
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