Diego Martinez Chacon - Handprint 014

Darkroom Handprint #014 – Diego Martinez Chacon

Paper size 8 x 12 cm

Original 1/1 Darkroom Handprint on Ilford Black & White Paper

Signed & stamped by the artist

All prints and editions come with a certificate of authenticity

Diego Martinez Chacon is a Mexican-American artist working in photography, filmmaking, publishing, writing, painting, and sound. Previously based in London and New York, he lives and works in Gràcia, Barcelona.

Chacon presents contemplative, bold works in photography that create and explore a modern identity through portraiture and abstract image-making, with a chic and raw sense of space, backed by a tonality often inspired by Brutalism. 

Here, the artist presents a limited edition of 50 one-of-one black & white darkroom prints - selected from a group of prints made as the artist worked an archive of over 1,000 negatives in preparation for his five year retrospective book Meditations. 

Statement:

"All of the images in this book were shot on film, and printed by hand in the darkroom in a fully analogue process, which allowed us to consider and manipulate our choices in colour and tone to the most careful extent. Through this photographic process we are able to present images that are, in the most basic sense of their nature, reflections of light, that were then carefully re-reflected onto paper by hand, and taken through a moving, live chemical reaction that then revealed the original reflection of light. There could be no more natural a process - here there are no lies between the image you are seeing and the colours and tones of light that the natural world allows.

Part of the beautiful nature of shooting on film is that it allows us to embrace and encourage imperfections in the reflections of light we choose to capture - a philosophy we made a point of carrying through to the darkroom process. Here mistakes become floods of colour, and blanket tones of light, and in many cases give the photograph new life and further their great abstraction. Every tiny speck of dust, and every subtle scratch, was present with us as we moved the film and paper by hand in the photographic process."