Image by Ben Smith. Used with permission.
“…I’ve always been interested in experimenting with photography. So I started with simple things like placing objects on top of prints while I enlarged them or double exposures, but I suppose I still wanted to go further.” says 20 year old photographer Ben Smith when telling us about his double exposure photo seen above. “I started a double exposure with a photo of my friend’s face and the other of a long exposure of the passing city traffic, so I’d get those long vertical streaks of light.” Ben says that the image began as a finger painting with developer, but he didn’t really like the way that it turned out.
The idea came from an Alternative Process class Ben is taking at the College of DuPage right now, and so he started to coat the paper in a similar way to doing a cyanotype or salt print. Blend this with the fact that he draws inspiration from various things and you’ve got this photo–which otherwise looks like a charcoal sketch, but Ben never even thought about that one!
“When people find out that I take photos I’m often asked of what specifically. I never have a definable answer, I usually say something like whatever catches my interest, which could be anything.” says Ben. “I’m very interested in continuing my experimental photography and post-processing.”
