Finding Your Voice

Photography and Method

I love working with vintage cameras and buy anything that functions and takes 120 film. This was an old Traveler camera © ann mitchell

Photography is an unusual discipline. Unlike many creative practices that move in a linear fashion from idea to execution, photography loops back on itself—fluid and open. It begins with an idea, and often a camera, but it doesn’t end there. It's a process made up of many decisions, each one layered with meaning, each one shaping what will eventually be called your “voice.”

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It starts, often quietly, with a feeling. Or a question. Sometimes a structure is imposed from the beginning. In his series “Chance Encounters” Doug McCulloh, one of the most original voices in contemporary photography, cut up the pages from a So Cal Thomas Guide and would randomly selecting a piece to determine where he would shoot each day.

Other times, the structure is looser. You may call yourself a street photographer. You may walk without destination until something speaks to you. Maybe you always carry your camera, or maybe the act of photographing is set aside for certain hours—ritualized, almost sacred. These choices are more than habits - they are the early awakenings of your voice.

Then comes the taking of the image—and again, it splinters into choices: Film or digital? Vintage lenses? Will you pause and compose, or shoot in motion? Do you look through the viewfinder, or let the camera float at your waist, detached? Or do you even shoot at all - choosing to work with found imagery, collage or public archives instead?

Then comes editing and output - unlike painting or sculpture, photography invites a second and third act, ones that are just as creative, just as personal. Some photographers do the bare minimum, treating the original like a document. Others rework their photographs until they become something else entirely—a new language formed over time.

For the past year, this has been the stage I’ve found myself in. In making my composites, much of my photographic life is rooted in the digital world. So, I’ve found a need to balance that with the mark of the hand - making the print into a unique object - a handmade one that’s imperfect.

© ann mitchell

The images/stories I’ve been working on are set in the hours between dusk and dawn and I want that twilight feeling to live in the print itself. At first, I tried adding cyanotype over my platinum palladium prints — drawn by its cool tones — but it overwhelmed the base. The two processes competed rather than conversed.

More recently, I’ve been experimenting with gum bichromate. It’s a 19th-century process where watercolor pigment is the coloring agent. What captivates me is its flexibility: you can pull the color into the shadows or let it live in the mid-tones, allowing the warmth of the original platinum to breathe underneath the veil of blue. Sounds perfect right?

Well the downside is it’s wildly unpredictable and temperamental - every print is in flux! It reminds me of ceramics — once you put that piece into the kiln…almost anything can happen. Some days I wonder if I’ll ever master it—or if I even want to. But for now, I’m in the darkroom, stumbling and learning, following the thread.

If you’re curious to see the process at its best, I recommend looking at the work of Keith Taylor and Diana Bloomfield. I recently took a workshop on gum over platinum with Kerik Kouklis and now that I’m home, I’m supplementing that with Christina Z. Anderson’s wonderful book on the process.

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We often think of finding our voice as something fixed—something waiting to be discovered. But maybe it’s more like this: a series of quiet decisions, of subtle leanings, of process and patience. We don’t find our voice all at once. We grow into it.