Photographers

Paul Kilsby trained originally in Fine Art at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne and the University of Wales. About fifteen years ago he began specialising in the medium of photography. At the same time, he started to research overlooked European artists involved in photography who had been marginalised by Modernist histories of photography. This archival research, undertaken in the Czech Republic, Poland, Russia, Germany and France, culminated in a PhD at the Royal College of Art. It also had an impact on his own imagery, which turned more and more upon exploring the relationship between photography and the history of painting. This body of work was gathered together in his exhibition and book, The Seer & The Seen. Since then Kilsby has continued to focus on the relationship between photography and painting.‘After Vermeer’ consists of sixteen photographs which revisit paintings by the seventeenth century Dutch painter, Johannes Vermeer. Kilsby has for many years been fascinated by Vermeer’s use of the camera obscura, a simple box-like device equipped with a lens, which he believes gave the painter an experience of the world that was essentially optical and photographic nearly two centuries before the conventional date given for the ‘birth of photography’. In recent years, work by Philip Steadman, David Hockney and others has confirmed that many aspects of Vermeer’s style drew upon this proto-photographic device. With this as his starting point, Kilsby has turned his own camera on to reproductions of Vermeer’s paintings, exploring their unique qualities of focus, lighting and composition through a variety of interventions. His strategies include composing new versions of the paintings, sometimes introducing figures from one painting into another; creating optical interruptions of one kind or another; and exploring a restricted focus in a way that recalls the cinematic narrative convention of throwing one figure into a blur while another snaps into sharp focus. In these and other ways Kilsby seeks to explore not only the uncanny visual immediacy of Vermeer’s paintings but also the intense silent narratives of people wholly immersed in thought. Prints The photographic prints in this series were made using the special technique known as the platinum palladium process. This technique involves great expertise both in the preparation of the precious metal salts of platinum and palladium used and in the coating by hand of the watercolour paper with the light sensitive emulsion. The results give an unparalleled luminosity to the prints due to the greatly extended tonal range which is capable of retrieving the finest nuances of light and shade. Photographs made using this process are also valued for their longevity – the stability of the platinum and palladium ensures that the prints will last for centuries without any changes. Preparing these prints has involved close co-operation between the artist and 31 Studio over several years. Kilsby’s choice of this specialist process which emerged in the early years of photography’s history was prompted by the desire to ‘return’ Vermeer’s vision to its photographic origins.