Blaine Herro
Bio
San Francisco-based photographer and darkroom artist working exclusively in monochrome through analog processes.
The photographs are a form of shadow work. The camera locates what the conscious mind slides past, and the recurring subjects and symbols that emerge over time become a way of reading the unconscious back to itself. The work is less about documenting the world than about using photography as a tool for psychological investigation, approaching material that, like dreams, can only be glimpsed obliquely.
Process
Each stage of the process produces new material for the next.
The negative is a gathering of visual grammar. In the darkroom, printing becomes interpretation: recomposing, reshaping tonality, suppressing or drawing forward what the image contains. The final object is a silver gelatin print, where all of these choices coalesce into something plainly specific and unsettlingly ambiguous.
Every image is made entirely by hand: shot on film, developed at home, printed in the darkroom on fiber-based paper, air dried, heat pressed flat, and retouched with pigment inks. No digital intermediate.