Ryan Zoghlin

"I am glad you ran a thread through these works. Maybe it’s just that things are more interesting where worlds intersect. Whether this is where the water’s edge meets the land or when the circus rolls into a small town. On the edge is where relationships and juxtaposition can be complicated and hopefully more visually interesting."

"I do tell myself when working technically that I’m working on the edge. For some reason, I like to come up with elaborate schemes to produce images. These seem like great ideas in my head, but often in practice don’t work out."

"My equipment tends to be more on the edge, also. Cameras with multiple lenses and shutter, hand held 5×7 and 8×10 cameras, pinhole and fingerprint cameras."

"I had done the airshow as straight black and white to print. I probably shot the show ten years in a row. I was trying to move beyond the straight prints and I was thinking more about the real sculptural affect that the contrails make as the airplanes were flying. I was trying to make a more three-dimension effect for the images. I started shooting it with a 5 x 7 camera, knowing that I wanted to do some contact prints, originally thinking that they might be platinum, or something like that. I was at an antique image show in Chicago and ran by an Orotone print that someone was selling. Not knowing if I had ever seen one before, I was pretty blown away by it. I asked the seller, What is this? and he said, An Orotone print. And I asked him, How do you make these? And he looked at me and he said, How would I know?"

"The three dimensional affected me but I also liked that it was an older process that gave a classic, vintage look to the image. It took me a couple of years to figure it out. I did a lot of research on Orotones and tried to find out how they are made and learned there is no written recipe. With experimentation, I made several Orotones and then took them from there. It has a kind of granular effect, playing with the gold powder, there’s a metallic feel to it. All these things work together to make the image really interesting."