Ben Altman

My family and friends are scattered over several continents and multiple marriages. People gather from their disparate lives for weddings, funerals and parties. I photograph these rites of passage, and smaller occasions. 

The photographs replace snapshots with something flawed, layered and  less resolved. The pieces depict a fairly privileged life within which family, friends, and connections are nevertheless evanescent. They are, in a way, memorials.

The images are composites, false panoramas created by incomplete frame advances and accidental double exposures. The individual exposures are made rather casually. The overlaps and sequencing are mostly unplanned and unforeseeable, juxtaposing incidents, conversations, and scenes that occurred at different times and sometimes in different spaces.

I use toy cameras, medium-format Holgas, with plastic or vintage lenses. Each frame falls away at the edges, so the overlap of one frame on the next blends across the join. I pick out a contiguous section of a strip of film to print with either Platinum/Palladium or Gold-toned Van Dyke processes. I use these hand-coated methods for their soft-toned rendering and permanence, appropriate to memorials but not to memories.