Joachim Knill

My current work consists of installations that I build in my studio and photograph with my homemade 20×30 instant film camera. This camera uses rolls of peel apart Polaroid instant film. Polaroid only made six 20×24 cameras. I was taken by the unsurpassed resolution and painterly color quality these cameras could produce. Consequently I had to build my own for a series of large Polaroid transfers of trees I was working on in the 4×5 format.

By the time I finished building the camera my focus had changed, instead I experimented with close ups of natural objects while testing the camera. Out of these tests evolved my present work.

My process starts with collection potentially useful props while I travel and camp between arts festivals. These are mostly natural objects such as stones, sticks, bones, dry paints or sand. Lately I’ve also been incorporating more and more remains of human made things. My most recent pieces include a lot of rotten junk that came with the house I bought. I let my ideas spring from lucid thoughts, staying open to whatever springs from my mind. When something emerges that I’m excited about I sketch it out. The basic Ideas are no different from the props I collect; they all become the raw materials for a piece. Once I have enough raw materials that group well together I start fitting props with ideas and combining props or ideas to create something that I feel works a reality while leaving the narrative suspended, like a still from an untold story, inspiring the viewer to fill in the gaps.

The actual building of the scene can take up to a week.

The shooting phase can take just as long. It’s amazing how much lighting changes the whole look and feel of a piece, it can make or break it. I always use at least 8 different lighting sources all with color gels on them to enhance the colors of individual objects and bring more depth and modeling into the scene. It’s much like in painting using contrasting colors for highlight and shadow areas to mimic the way we perceive the world as interpreted through our eyes. More and more most of my lighting is “painted” in, moving the lights around during an exposure while pinpointing them onto selected areas. Once I fine-tuned the lighting for a scene it will take up to an hour to execute and individual exposure. By the time I’m finished with a scene I’ll have up to ten polaroids of which two or three are failed tests, and the rest are successful variations of the same set up.

I create smaller versions of the Polaroids by photographing them with a 4×5 camera and printing in the darkroom onto Kodak photographic paper. All mats are acid free archival museum board. Polaroids are framed under UV filtering, scratch resistant plexiglass.

Panorama Composites

My panoramas are created by photographing a scene from many different angles and positions. Then I sequentially print them in the darkroom onto a single piece of silver gelatin photographic paper. I arrange them in a way that maintains the illusion of a panorama while capturing how a place is remembered after having spent time observing it from more that just one vantage point, Most of my panoramas are bleached and toned to achieve tonal variations within each print.