I have a photo crush: Ian Aleksander Adams

Ian Aleksander Adams BFA student Savannah College of Art and Design, Savannah, GA. Below are excerpts from Ian’s emails to me. I appreciate his f...

Ian Aleksander Adams

BFA student

Savannah College of Art and Design, Savannah, GA.

Below are excerpts from Ian’s emails to me. I appreciate his fervor.

Motivation? Bio? I’m not sure. I’m driven by the Creating Fear. It feels like fear in your chest but it isn’t.

I get so excited. I can’t sleep. It won’t go away until I do
something, until I produce, until I save, and cage it in an idea, a
paragraph, an image, a wall, a gallery. It stalks and turns and twists
and shivers and drives me from under my ribcage.

Sounds emo now that I’ve written it, but it’s a strong emotion. It
isn’t love and it isn’t fear, but it stings under the chest like that.
Maybe it’s heartburn, or I’m constantly lifting off in an airplane and
don’t know it. hahaha

There are faces on every wall, about 20×24 and you can see every pore.
I also noticed a recent trend in photography where everyone is very
desaturated. I like the look, but I was interested in the things that
were being lost with the loss of the reds and magentas in images. I
pushed that while scanning the images and brought out people’s
freckles, pock marks, etc. It’s gritty, but seeing that every single
person had them (I shot 136 people for the project, mostly young
people, I wanted to have an aspect of innocence, aged 17-40) and
eventually they looked really really beautiful to me.

More after the jump….

Everyone was asked to think of the first time they heard bad news… be it a favorite toy lost or a son dying, something that was bad to them, and how it first made them feel. That first time and how they reacted.

I shot the original images on slide film with my Mamiya 645AFD last year (originally planning to print them through a darkroom process I started doing to the despair of my teachers, where I’d print the positive to make a negative print, then flip it and contact print it to make a positive, but I just didn’t have the time or budget to do that, and they wouldn’t have been as big or sharp as I wanted them, so I spent a few months scanning), which I really have to dust off, since I keep leaving the lovable clunker under my bed in favor of shooting without a lightmeter with my tiny rolleicord V, which still gives me bigger pictures… though, you know, for all that megapixel nonsense on digital cameras (where more megapixels means more picture… uh not, it could mean more noise) the images on my 645 are half the size but so much sharper… they enlarge to even bigger sizes much much nicer.

Oh, for those equipment jockeys, before anyone asks, they were shot with a 120mm Mamiya Macro lens, which I swear by on that camera. Odd because I don’t really care otherwise, and I don’t even use it that much, but it’s the damn best lens I’ve ever touched.

And actually, I can’t say I know why that girl has fangs in her nose. She likes them there, I guess. I think it’s a bone. Everyone was wearing their normal street clothes.

-Ian

Cool beans, Rachel. Everything I know I learned in blogs. Er, books. Whatever.
I’ll let you know if I see anything amazing, but chances are it will be in a photog-blog already. I’ll keep my eye on those scad kids.

best,
Ian

Sorry to email you again, but I just remembered that I’m also running a calls for entry called Knees Are Weird. There is currently a rolling deadline and it’s at www.kneesareweird.com Maybe some of your readers would like to submit. There’s no fee, and it’s being collected over email. The rest of the details are at the site.

Best,
Ian

Let me now if you’ve got any more questions, I’ll be up for a few more hours tonight.

Best,
Ian