shashasha

Edward Dimsdale is a master printmaker who over the past three decades has explored and adapted historical methods of photographic print making to produce breathtakingly beautiful, emotionally charged photographs. Dimsdale's book Stilled shares something with the Haiku, which often presents three elements: something permanent, something ephemeral, and what happens in the moment when they come together. The starting point for Dimsdale's analogue prints is often something very simple, a detail, a moment, a gesture. It could be as particular as a glance from a trainee Geisha or the barren branches of a tree against a winter sky. Once in the darkroom, Dimsdale undertakes a complex procedure to try to recapture something of the sensation he felt while making the photograph. From a film negative, he makes a series of paper inter-negatives, a technique that degrades certain aspects of the image, whilst enhancing others ― a contemporary refinement of a historical method, rather like photocopying a photocopy.