I am a photographer.

I love film photography and darkroom and alternative printing. The two inextricably go together – I see my photographs as simply the first stage of a long process that culminates in a print. If a photograph does not end up as a print, I feel the lack of something important, an unfinished business.

I am not one to decry digital photography. Digital techniques can open up photographs in ways that would be impossible in a traditional darkroom. However the ease with which a beautiful photograph can be made can be to its own detriment.

“That which is too easily obtained, is rarely prized, and becoming common, it does not afford that stimuli which impels men onward in their pursuits, and leads to the improvement of every department of science and art.” –Hunt, Robert, A Popular Treatise on the Art of Photography, 1841.

The manual craft of producing photographs with your hands satisfies something that a computer screen doesn’t. It is difficult to explain why this is so.

On this website I do three things:

  1. I share some of my frustrations in learning film development and print making.
  2. I write about what photography means to me by looking at the work of other photographers and sometimes my own.
  3. As an independent philosopher, I write about philosophy, mainly in a discursive way. For me philosophy is nothing other than learning to employ concepts in the making sense of things. It does not aim to strive for the ‘hidden truth’ of things, but only to re-conceive what is already there in a different light. And that, of course, is what we photographers do too, re-conceive in a different light.

Clwydian Hiils, North Wales. Adox Silvermax 100 in Rodinal; 28mm lens.

I hope there is something of value in these pages.

Kind Regards, Tony Cearns.