FLICKR ARTIST: "Area Bridges", Sean O'Brien

Di Margherita Marchioni

Il fotografo che presento oggi si chiama Sean O'Brien. Le sue foto giocano con tecniche diverse. Quelle che mi hanno colpito di più sono i suoi collages e le esposizioni lunghe e distorte che giocano con la luce. Ecco che cosa ci ha raccontato!

Visitate il suo sito su Flickr!

Visit him on Flickr!

"Landscape 2"

1) Tell us something about yourself as a photographer

I've been obsessed with cameras since I was a kid. As a teenager I got into 35mm and making black and white prints. I’ve always liked playing with long exposures, distorting angles, and unusual perspectives. In college I carried a camera everywhere (a Pentax ME-Super), shooting black and white film and pretty much documenting everything -- to the point where it developed into a sort of pathological habit. Eventually I felt like I had just spent too much time in the darkroom, so I slowed down and started using an old medium-format camera (a Yashica D) and color film for a few years. Then I got hooked on getting long exposures with Polaroids, which kept me pretty busy for a while. That led to the Polaroid Joycam, and I eventually realized I could do multiple exposures with that camera. Then there was a period when I was mostly just taking baby pictures. About a year and a half ago I saw my first TtV (“through the viewfinder”) photos, and I jumped right in, at more or less the same time as I joined Flickr.

In general I tend to enjoy photography most when it's got an element of play to it. I like getting wrapped up in the process, trying out new approaches.

"GCT"

2) Let's talk about photocollages. I adore your "Jack-o-Lantern" photo. How do you plan a photocollage? Is it difficult?

With my new DSLR it's relatively easy to do a collage, because I canpan across the scene at different angles, taking dozens of shots in just a couple of minutes. Of course, I'm usually doing this through a big LEGO contraption built around a Brownie or a Duaflex, shooting through the viewfinder, so it's "relatively" easy. I assemble collages in Photoshop, adding each individual shot as a new layer. That is not terribly difficult, but it does take more than a little patience.

One thing I like about doing photocollages with TtV shots is that the perspective is already pretty strongly distorted in each photo, so when you start lining them up there is a significant curvature to everything -- there’s just no way the various pieces are going to line up “correctly,” in other words, so you have to improvise and choose how to work it out.

The "Jack-o-Lantern" collage is a little different than most of the others because it's all close-ups. I was having trouble getting a good standalone TtV photo of the pumpkin, and I thought it would be worth getting in close and turning it into something big.

"Jack-o-Lantern"

3)You love long exposures, where you can play with light and blurring edges. Do you think that a photo can be great even without being in focus or recognizable?

I like how long exposures can turn different light sources into abstract compositional elements. I'm not all that interested in getting accurate reproductions of my subjects -- I would rather get an unusual perspective, make something strange out of something relatively straightforward.

"Jellyfish (x4)"

4) What are your inspirations?

I know it's trite, but my kids are my biggest inspiration lately. I love taking pictures of them getting lost in play; it's my playtime! I've particularly enjoyed taking them to natural history museums and aquariums, which I remember being fascinated with when I was young. It helps that there are so many visually dramatic, surreal situations in museums -- it's good all around, because they have fun, and I have fun taking pictures of them having fun. Plus, they will have some pretty unusual family snapshots to look back at.

"Light toys"

5) What part as Flickr in your being a photographer?

Flickr is great. It’s amazing how it can bring together all these arcane subcultures -- people who are obsessed with LEGO, people who love to take pictures of trees in fog, people who take pictures of headless dolls as seen through sunglasses, whatever. I feel at home in the “through the viewfinder” group, where a lot of my contacts post, and I’m familiar enough with their style that I can sometimes guess who the photo is from before seeing the name.

It’s great getting feedback and then seeing the photostreams of those people -- you never know whether you will see something like what you do yourself, or something else entirely. It sort of opens up your imagination and gets you thinking in different visual terms. I’ve tried a few new techniques after seeing them in my contacts’ photostreams (for instance, lately, using polar distortion to make “little planets”), and sometimes I’m out shooting and think “Valcox is going to like this one.”

I think Flickr is a brilliant use of the internet, just because visual information is so fast. You can tell almost instantaneously whether a photo interests you, so you can very quickly sort through a page of thumbnails and identify what you like. (You can’t really browse through music or books or films with that kind of efficiency). So it’s easy to focus on what you like, and simple to “favorite” it; once you get drawn into the whole economy of comments and favorites andcontacts and groups, Flickr becomes a self-reinforcing obsession.

"Post Street"

6) What's your favourite technique? And camera?

I'm pretty stuck on TtV these days -- it has really sparked a whole new wave of activity for me. In certain ways it's very limited and rigid, like a cookie-cutter approach to images, but at the same time it tends to distort angles and introduce a surreal quality. The limitations themselves are a kind of challenge, something to react against.

I love my new camera. It's a Pentax K200 digital SLR. I've had if for about five months, and I've barely scratched the surface in terms of its various settings and modes. It has made it incredibly easy to experiment when I'm shooting, because I can take literally hundreds of exposures, just moving forward in the knowledge that I can sort it all out later, on the computer.