Diego Martinez Chacon - Handprint 26

Handprint 26 – Diego Martinez Chacon

All prints and editions come with a certificate of authenticity

Diego Martinez Chacon (b. 1997. USA)  is a Mexican-American artist working in photography, filmmaking, publishing, writing, and sound. Previously based in London and New York, he lives and works in Gràcia, Barcelona, since 2023. 

Chacon's work in photography mixes a sense of contemplation with bold expression. The artist creates portraits and abstract images to explore a modern identity and develop a personal style, usually marked by a chic-raw sense of space, and a Brutalist-inspired tonality.

Bellas Artes presents a limited edition of 30 one-of-one black & white darkroom handprints - selected from a group of prints made by the artist as he worked an archive of over 1,000 negatives in preparation for his five year retrospective photography 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, by putting every image through multiple rounds of trial and error.

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 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 I've 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 photographs new life and further their great abstraction. Every tiny speck of dust, and every subtle scratch, was present with me as I moved the film and paper by hand in the photographic process.

These 30 black and white prints are a testament to all of the mistakes and trials one goes through when making an analogue image. They are completely one of one, and created compeltely by hand, from the moment I loaded the film into the camera, to years later when I printed the image and chemically exposed it in the darkroom."