Robert Oehl

Artist Statement

My photography is totally analog. I use a 4” x 5” pinhole camera because of its simplicity, distinctive soft focus, and requisite long exposures that better record time and movement. I pose for my own photographs because I want to be part of each step of the image making, but my presence in the image is incidental, and I don’t feel it reveals much about me. Photographs are timeless, so I try to avoid props such as clothing or objects that would provide a temporal context. I’m very interested in the chemical nature of photography. I develop my film in a coffee-based, homebrew developer which gives me a negative that is suitable for printing, and is more environmentally friendly than commercial chemical developers. My prints are made by hand coating cotton rag paper with a Ziatype or Cyanotype emulsion and exposing the paper, with it’s negative, under UV light. This process is unpredicable, often resulting in grainy images, and significant tone shifts. Sometimes, I age and patinate the photograph by waxing, rubbing, or scratching the surface. Subsequently, many of my photographs are unique and impossible to reproduce. In my process, I am singularily involved in making the photograph.

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