Ross Wallis + Digital Media + Art

teacher and enthusiast

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I am a taker of photographs - although I have never been too interested in the f stop or focal length. A am a believer in the happy accident, the creativity of chaos and chance. I never did like the darkroom much - digital photography frees me from the exactitudes of chemical processing, allowing my creativity to flourish and flow. The iPhone, the iPad, the apps, the immediacy, the possibilities for montage, for photograph imagery flowing into drawn imagery - transparency - layering - peeling back - playing until I have something that pleases me.

The human species is very akin to the magpie in its need to collect - and the digital revolution has provided many more avenues for collecting - friends, mp3’s, images...

It is a very exciting time to be a photographer, with the extraordinary speed of change created by the development of smart phones and apps. With Instagram, Hipster, and all the other apps that reproduce the look of early photographic processes, and the ability to add scuffs and scratches at the touch of a button, it strikes me that we are going through a process of re-defining what photography is by looking back at what it has been, before we take of in this new totally digital and handy direction. It also strikes me that early photographers such as Peach Robinson, Stieglitz and Cameron went through a similar process over 100 years ago, when they were initially defining what photography might be by re-creating painterly compositions photographically.



I have been taking photographs since age 12. One thing that I (like many others) have done over time, is to take self portraits in mirror and glass - as a teenager I was fascinated by a Rembrandt self portrait - the intense inwardly directed gaze - and since teenagehood I have taken photographs of my reflected self. There is a collection of these on the personal section of this website, along with other collections - cloth, rust, wood, road, painting, signs, faces... Great potential for projects with students. And then there is blipfoto - a journal the idea of which is to create and upload a photo each day - with the constraint that the photo be taken on the day - and a further constraint in my case, that the photo be taken on an iphone - hence iphonography.