Matthew Walley
Process, 2020
Silver gelatin prints
Dimensions variable
Process. Photography to me is all about how you get there. When shooting on film, the process of photography is evident. You take your photos, develop the film, and shoot light through that film onto paper to create the photo. It’s great, your photos will come out the same way every time, retangular and all, just the way you shot it. That was a hurdle I wanted to leap.
During my Junior year, I learned about alternative processes; Painting with the chemicals instead of just dumping the whole photo in them, creasing and crumbling the paper, and even using the sun to develop my prints. These methods presented themselves as a solution to my problem, but not entirely. I needed to see if I could create a whole different photo, using the same one. That’s what I sought to do for my series.
To start, it is incredibly hard to do anything “off-book” in the darkroom, because you can’t see what your photo will look like until after you create it. The darkroom is already dark, but now I had to work blind. Not to mention that no two prints look the same. These are important distinctions to draw between the normal process and the alternative. It is that uncertainty that adds to the excitement of exploiting a medium like photography. Using a different process completely destroys the one in place, which forced me to figure out new solutions to problems already solved.
With my works I tried to emphasize motion, experimentation, and of course, process. Through experimenting with the process, I found myself caring less about the photos I had actually taken, and more about what I could make them. I want people to look at my work and ask how not why. Exploiting a medium isn’t anything new to the history of photography. But that shouldn’t stop anyone from doing anything. Art connects us, I am connected with hundreds of people who did or are doing the same thing as me now, and yet I am still creating my own style of work.
What the process reveals is that we are all different in how we approach it. You could get any person to walk into the darkroom with the same film as me, have them use alternative processes, and they would come out with prints that are completely unique. We all end at one point, but there are infinite ways to get there.
