Ian Wallace

I live close to the North Wessex Downs and have been a keen photographer since my childhood. I like photograph a wide range of subjects usually in black and white.

I try to be a good observer and like Street and classical styles of photography. I hope you will ask “What’s going on here?” when you view my images. Sometimes it will just be I’ve looked differently at something that passes for everyday and sometimes I hope I’ve caught a moment that will pass. My love is for Black and White and all the work I show is analogue and taken on film or paper negatives. I love everything about the creative process from capturing the moment to seeing a print appear in the tray. At present I’m experimenting with a range of cameras and while I’m very comfortable with an SLR in my hand I’m also now working with large formats up to whole plate.

My uncle bought me a camera for my 10th birthday and perhaps concerned about the film processing costs my father blacked out the kitchen and taught me to process the film. I was hooked and as a youth I really wanted to be a photographer but I ended up with a career in IT. Now at last, I’m taking the opportunity to follow my passion and though for many the photography is now entirely digital I still love the analogue process.

I am a interested in photo history and in 2018 published a the book On a Hill Road which celebrates the stereo photography of my great great uncle. The title On a Hill Road is taken from one of his photographic compositions but I rather liked its suggestion of being out and about with a camera and have adopted it and associate it with my own publishing work.
 

This is my the lounge of my home. In November 2019 we we forced out of our home of nearly 30 years at almost no notice when domestic heating oil from a neighbouring property leaked under the house and its odour pervaded every room. I wanted to capture something of the pain of watching our house being torn apart as a necessity of the clean up work. I wanted to share the pain with the house. The lounge is as the workmen had left it with the umbilical drainage pipes and on the mantle piece a piece of flooring saved by the builders that happened to form a heart . Because of the high humidity in the house black mould has set in. In December 2020 I took a short experimental series of nude and semi-nude self portraits pictures in secret. Our house is stripped of its wallcoverings and floors and it only seemed right I should share something of that nakedness with our home. I long to return.

Analogue darkroom photographic print from a 120 HP5+ negative

34x34cm

Framed under glass