Today Jim Lamont will be giving a presentation to the Club as the final step on his road to Club Master Photographer. I asked Jim some questions for a profile and he kindly provided the responses below.
DE What were your earliest photographic experiences?
JL My photographic journey started when I was ten years old. My father gave me one of his old cameras and I took several rolls of black and white photographs while the family was on vacation. When I saw the results, which failed utterly to capture what I thought I had seen, I lost all interest in photography until 1977. That year I traveled in the arctic for the first time, a five-week ski-mountaineering expedition just north of Baffin Island followed by a solo ten-day walk through Auyuittuq National Park. I shot hundreds of Kodachrome slides with my new Olympus OM-1. And I have been trying ever since then to use photography to create tokens of remembrance of the ever changing beauty I experience in non-urban contexts. Over the years I’ve had three articles with my photographs in the Canadian Geographic, including a cover photograph, and also been published in a variety of other magazines, a book, and a calendar. My current exhibition, “Spindrift Summits” at the Trinity Gallery, is my sixth one-person / focus show, with previous shows at galleries such as the Foyer Gallery and Centrepointe Theatre Gallery for example. In 2003, I started PeregrinePrints, a company dedicated to working with photographers to make fine art quality prints at affordable prices, and I also teach with the School of the Photographic Arts: Ottawa (SPAO), Henry’s School of Imaging, and various community centre and private classes.
DE How would you describe your photographic style?
JL My goal is always to see and present my subject in the strongest manner possible. For me this usually implies what might be called a “straight” or “realistic” rendering. Colour is used when the image calls for it, and black and white whenever colour would be a distraction, such as when form and texture are paramount. This requires the use of the new digital technologies, which confer the requisite control of saturation and contrast and print longevity’s that formerly were only achievable with black and white. I have been progressing toward larger prints, in part because my favourite subject, mountains, requires this. Panoramas are a natural extension, with the new digital techniques simultaneously allowing larger size, higher detail, and enormous compositional flexibility.
DE What is it about the photographic print, to which you are particularly committed, that is important to you?
JL The photographic print is my desired end point for photography. All else is preamble, a means to this end. Although the experience of viewing a print is dependent on proper lighting, it seems to me to interpose the least technology ultimately between the photographer and the viewer. Prints alone allow the degree of control I believe is essential to expressing what I want my photography to convey. I consider prints a form of artistic performance, and I appreciate the craft and artistry and science that goes into making them. The finest prints by the great masters such as Ansel Adams show a level of nuance and beauty that no other photographic medium can rival. They are beautiful in themselves.
DE What’s next in your photographic journey?
JL I plan to continue learning how to make better prints (a lifelong enterprise), while working on both old and new photographic projects and subjects. Along the way, I hope I get the chance to give back and share my love for my subjects and the photographic endeavour.
Editor’s postscript:
Jim’s achievement provides a timely reminder, at this point in history when we mostly view photographs via electronic screens, of the value of engaging with and committing to an image sufficiently deeply to make an expressive print.
The American photographer Charles Pratt (1926–1976) summed it up well when he wrote:
I spend a good deal of time printing, because to me a photograph is only a photograph when it’s a photograph – not when it’s an unrealized potential in a badly printed negative, nor when it’s a reproduction. Printing is an essential part of the process of transforming the experience into a photographic image. This involves fiddling with tonality, not for the sake of richness as it applies to pieces of silver on paper, but as it applies to the memory of the surface of what was in front of me, and as it applies to the unity of the image within the rectangle. The whole chain of effort starts with the experience of actuality at the moment of exposure, and this experience must be held all along the way if it is to be held at the end – as for me it must be.
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