Brendan Barry (England, lives in Exeter) is a photographer, educator and camera builder, whose practice combines elements of construction, education, performance and participation. His work is mostly concerned with the transformation of different objects and environments into spaces capable of viewing and capturing a photographic image. Using the mechanics of the medium, he challenges the conventional understanding of the photographic apparatus as a means of inviting audience collaboration and exploration. His most recent body of work, Wildflowers picked on walks with Bea, arose from his daily walks with his daughter during the lockdown year. They started picking wildflowers, bringing them home and arranging them into still lives, which would be then captured using a camera obscura and darkroom that Barry had constructed out of his garden shed. The emerging series touches on themes of family, health & wellbeing and a connection with nature. By shooting directly on to photographic paper using a homemade camera obscura and using a meticulously developed colour reversal method, Barry creates large scale unique works that are the results of a lengthy and laborious process in the darkroom. The photographs are hard to achieve, with successful exposure times sometimes taking up to eight hours. This time spent with the process of making is not only an opportunity to engage with artistry of analogue photography, but also a time of solitude and peacefulness to observe the bird song of the night and the various flora and fauna that had previously gone unnoticed.
www.brendanbarry.co.uk

Liz Nielsen (USA, lives in New York) uses a contemporary application of one of the best-known avant-garde photographic processes - the photogram - which was first mastered by Man Ray and Maholy-Nagy at the beginning of the 20th Century. Each unique colour image is created without a camera by placing objects directly onto photographic paper and exposing them to light. 'The final outcomes are pre-planned with strong intention and formally composed,' she explains, 'but because I'm working with light, they always have some surprises. The light bleeds and spills and doesn't want to be contained.'
www.liznielsen.com

Joanne Dugan (USA, lives in New York) produces collages made up of silver gelatin prints created without the use of a camera. She painstakingly hand cuts and hand-paints her compositions using historic printing techniques and vintage equipment to pay homage to the physical limitations and opportunities found in analogue methods. Dugan views this process as a meditative one, 'The darkroom is, for me, a refuge from the infiltration of technology and the fastness it represents. One goal with these works is to retain visual evidence of the hand used in making them.
www.joannedugan.com

Adam Jeppesen (Denmark, lives in Argentina) creates work that addresses the materiality and transience of the photograph as an object. Much of Jeppesen's work is the result of a solitary 487-day journey from the North Pole to Antarctica in 2007. The journey has left visible traces and blemishes on the photographs as he carried his film and camera equipment with him on the road, where the negatives picked up grit and dust along the way. Jeppesen celebrates these imperfect elements rather than tries to hide them. Coincidence, damage and imperfection are essential elements in his work. At a time when the image has become infinitely perfectible and reproducible, Jeppesen experiments with the photograph as a unique object that is subject to the forces of change and decay.
www.adamjeppesen.com