Last Updated on 12/24/2024 by Nilofer Khan
“The hardest thing to do, once you know your process, is to let go of the technique,” says photographer Ben Felten in an interview with the Phoblographer. “For a while, I was producing very similar images from each shoot. They were pretty, and the models were happy (both important aspects) but I was kind of going in circles.” Ben works to constantly change up what he’s doing — which is something that really only the best photographers do. However, they’re not trying to change it up for an algorithm. Instead, Ben works to ensure that the process isn’t getting boring for him. And that also means sometimes asking his wife for help on understanding why an image is powerful for him.
All images by Ben Felten. Used with permission. Please check out his website and Vimeo page for more.
Typically, the Phoblographer publishes our interviews as longer stories. But for this one, we encourage you to sit back, relax and give this one a ready. It’s the holiday season, and it’s a great reason to slow down now.
Talk to us about the origins of the love story between you and photography.
Ben Felten: Like many people of my generation (I was born in 1972), I used film photography until my 30s, when I slowly switched to digital. None of that was ever serious photography though, more the capture of memories (although that’s also a serious role of photography, but maybe not the topic at hand). Around 2003 we acquired a family digital point and shoot.
Then in 2009 I had the opportunity to go to New Zealand for two weeks as part of my job, and when I looked back at my point and shoot images, they were so far removed from the incredible skies, ferns and seas that I had experienced that I strongly hinted to my wife I’d like a proper digital camera for my birthday.
That, really was the start of the journey. I shot constantly, and compulsively. Looking back at those early images, there’s one thing that connects with my current projects, which is textures. I’d shoot close ups of manholes, wire fences, brick walls, leaves, pinecones, all kinds of repetitive texture.
I was living in Paris at the time, a going to jazz clubs on a very regular basis. One of the things I found fascinating was the looks that the musicians gave each other when improvising, a sort of unspoken communication. I decided that was worth capturing on photo as well which got me into concert photography in badly lit jazz clubs. In a way, apart from photographs of my wife and kids, that was my first serious foray into portraiture.
I often get asked if I produce my images in Photoshop, and when I say no, that it’s an entirely analog and organic process, the following question is often “why not do it in Photoshop?” My non-confrontational stock answer to that is that I’d rather spend my time behind a camera taking photos than in front of a screen editing and blending images in software. But I think there’s something deeper about the creative process in there as well. I feel like my images have a more tangible reality because they have been produced organically. It means that the accidents, the stuff I cannot plan for or predict is part of the process, and when everything aligns properly, it’s a miracle rather than the cold reliance on a filter or grid.
Ben Felten
Then came the trip back into film. I was looking for a photography club, and the only one I found near where I lived was an analog printing club. So I bought a cheap Spotmatic F and started shooting film, just to have negatives to print. I loved printing, although I struggled with shooting film, especially all manual (no autofocus, no reliable exposure information). Experimenting with film cameras made me discover accidental double exposures, which I found both chaotic and weirdly fascinating. Another brick in the wall to be.
All of this came together a few years later. The family had moved to Hong Kong, and I was getting dissatisfied with my photography. I did a lot of street photography, and I felt that my images were quite good, but also that I had seen them, or very similar ones, before. In other words, I wondered what the point was of producing images that had already been done. So I started experimenting and came back to double exposures. What if I could superimpose a texture and a person, I thought?
It took me a while to get it working, and in the process of doing so, I realized that the kind of organic blend I was after could only be obtained on naked skin: clothes have their own texture and got in the way. So I started doing nude photography, although it didn’t feel like I was when I was looking at the end result. All this was done on film, inside the camera: I first shot the textures, one full roll of 36 exposures, then wound the film back into the canister and shot a full roll of portraits.
There’s a system to double exposures, which is that wherever one image is dark, the other image will be visible, and wherever one image is light, the other will be partially or totally erased. Essentially, what I was doing was shooting my portraits in front of a really bright white background – which erased the texture from behind the model – and lighting the model in a way that created shadows where the texture would come through.
It took a few months, but I finally had something that felt my own, even though I didn’t invent the technique, and am aware of a few film photographers doing similar stuff. But it felt sufficiently my own that I found my motivation again. This is how the Photosynthesis project was born.
Give us a list of your essential camera gear and how it helps you achieve your creative vision.
Ben Felten: I’m going to disappoint gearheads here, because not only do I use film cameras for this project, I use cheap film cameras. One of the challenges of my approach is to align the frames when you put your roll into the camera the second time. At some point, I had an epiphany and realized that some cameras would allow me to do that quasi-automatically, without the uncertain manual fiddling that happens a lot in double exposures. Some late 90s film cameras had a feature called prewind where instead of rolling the film out of the can as you take photos, the camera winds the whole film out and then slowly rolls in back inside the canister as you take photos. The off shoot of that (for me) was that the starting point was when the whole film was wound out, so always the same starting point. Long story short, I located one such camera, the EOS 300 (also called Rebel in the US market, I think), which had this feature, and stuck with it. It’s an entry level camera, very easy to find second hand for about $30. It’s the only camera I use for this, with relatively entry level glass as well, a 50mm f/2 and a 100mm f/2.8 macro. That’s it, really.
There’s a system to double exposures, which is that wherever one image is dark, the other image will be visible, and wherever one image is light, the other will be partially or totally erased.
Ben Felten
Film buffs however will berate me for not mentioning film stock. I tried various black and white and colour films and settled on black and white, primarily Ilford FP4+. It has the right level of contrast and detail for what I’m doing and is not so slow that I struggle to shoot the textures I want. Lately I’ve experimented with Ilford Ortho as well for some very specific images, but that’s a subset of the project.
Can you tell us about your creative vision with these images and how you go about making them?
Ben Felten: It’s not always easy to figure out why you create what you create. This came a while after I started producing images using this technique. I was attracted to natural textures, plants in particular. Looking back, I realized that by that time, I’d been living 6 years in Asian megacities, where nature is nowhere to be found. Consciousness of the need to preserve our environment was on the rise, and I felt keenly about that too. But photography that expresses the degradation of our environment tends to be dramatic, scary and depressing.
I think I was unconsciously trying to create images that expressed our necessary proximity to nature, and the beauty of humans as part of nature. That is why from the start I worked with amateur models with no preconception as to their looks: all genders, all skin tones, all morphologies were interesting to me. I felt like I needed to find the beauty in all. I hope that the images I create express that in a way that makes us both aware that we need to preserve nature, and be more part of it, but in a way that’s uplifting. Don’t get me wrong, we need scary images too to push us into doing something about it, but I feel that it’s also important to see, in a symbolic way, what we should be fighting for.
In practical terms, as mentioned before, I first shoot a roll of plant textures, and then I organize a studio session with one or more models. I work exclusively with amateur models, often people who have never posed before, let alone naked. And yet this allows me and the model to create images that feel natural, which is in line with the project’s philosophy. I then have the film processed and scanned (I don’t trust myself enough to process, and I’m too lazy to scan) and once the scans come back, I review them with the model to decide together what they are comfortable with showing and what I’d like to include in my portfolio. At the intersection of that is the stuff that I show online, but the project has many more images that I use only for exhibitions or a work in progress book that me and a designer friend are working on.
How do you know when the photo is “right for you” so to speak. By that, I mean, have you figured out a pattern in when the images bring you joy enough to include them in your portfolio?
Ben Felten: Interestingly enough, there is one aspect of the double exposures of old that I’ve tried to emulate, and that is randomness. When I shoot my textures on film, I rarely take digital images of the textures. I jot down a few notes on my notebook if there’s something specific I need to remember, like a direction to the texture, or a symmetry, but otherwise I shoot the portrait blind to the texture. This is what I call embracing the chaos. It leads to a fair few missed opportunities, but when it works it works in ways I could not have anticipated nor planned for. There’s an incredible joy into these accidental successes, and they happen way more often that I’d initially thought they would.
The hardest thing to do, once you know your process, is to let go of the technique. For a while, I was producing very similar images from each shoot. They were pretty, and the models were happy (both important aspects) but I was kind of going in circles. As we started working on this book project, the guy I’m working with told me quite directly that he loved the images, but felt there wasn’t enough variety in the poses, the textures, etc. That was the kick in the pants I needed to start experimenting again, and I feel that some of the recent results have been really powerful.
That said, I try not to overanalyse, otherwise I tend to only see the things I like less in an image. If it strikes me at first, there’s probably a good reason and that suggests I should keep it. My wife is also my best and most valuable critic. I show her my work and her feedback often forces me to either discard images that are superficially interesting, but lack depth or meaning, or double down and justify why I find something powerful. In both cases it’s invaluable insight.
We really liked your images partially because, as we’ve been going through various projects, there’s something that’s very human about it. With that said, what are your thoughts about all the AI projects out there these days and “AI images” as they’re called? How much post-production do you typically do? And how do you feel that it’s affecting the whole misunderstanding of art vs content in photography?
Ben Felten: I’m a film photographer first and foremost, and what little digital I do for creative purposes then gets printed using alt processes like cyanotype or polaroid lifts. There is always something material about my work, be it negatives or handmade prints.
I often get asked if I produce my images in Photoshop, and when I say no, that it’s an entirely analog and organic process, the following question is often “why not do it in Photoshop?” My non-confrontational stock answer to that is that I’d rather spend my time behind a camera taking photos than in front of a screen editing and blending images in software. But I think there’s something deeper about the creative process in there as well. I feel like my images have a more tangible reality because they have been produced organically. It means that the accidents, the stuff I cannot plan for or predict is part of the process, and when everything aligns properly, it’s a miracle rather than the cold reliance on a filter or grid.
That said, there’s a bit of post-production to produce the digital images that you see here. I use Lightroom and try to stick to the kind of impact I could have printing in the darkroom: luminosity, contrasts, that kind of thing. There’s a specific type of image where that’s not always possible, and it’s bugged me because I really love them, but I know I couldn’t print most of these in the darkroom, but I think I have just found a way, by using a different film stock, to get them to properly organically work on film.
There is an argument that the physicality of the film medium will increase the perceived value of my work because while it may be replicated in Photoshop or through AI, these alternative approaches will never have that physicality. But at the same time, I’m very aware that the threat of Gen AI is in the way it devalues all images, in the way it creates a suspicion that nothing you see is real. I create images that look surreal without digital intervention, but when everything looks surreal, where does that leave me?
In a sense, I am lucky in that I don’t make my living as a photographer. So while professional photographers all see their very livelihood threatened by AI, I only risk to see my work devalued and disregarded. This hasn’t happened so far, and it’s why it’s so important to me to keep doing this the way I do, the old fashioned way, where every creative decision is mine, and not that of a set of tools or a collection of algorithms.
AUTHENTICITY STATEMENT
The Phoblographer works with human photographers to verify that they’ve actually created their work through shoots. These are done by providing us assets such as BTS captures, screenshots of post-production, extra photos from the shoot, etc. We do this to help our readers realize that this is authentically human work. Here’s what this photographer provided for us.
