Jonathan Bensimon

CHROMASKETCH

The Chromasketch project started as a way to explore my creative process and reconnect with photography. Ten years ago I shot one of my last rolls of film. Digital photography, at the time, seemed so much more inspiring: endless shooting, modifications and meticulous tweaking. I could now create the exact photographs I had envisioned. But the results were abandoned hard drives filled with images I would eventually, one day, okay maybe never get around to retouching, lazy snapshots buried on phones, and shelved digital cameras. So in May of 2015 I decided to shoot a roll of slide film each week on the camera I learned on, an old twin-lens Rolleiflex. Shooting slide film meant little to no manipulation once the image was taken. The camera accompanied me almost everywhere as I found elements that visually caught my attention. Whether it was the subject or the graphic nature of contrasting elements within a frame, I shot these images like I would draw a sketch. Each year I would accumulate over 600 images. The idea was to create one giant backlit contact sheet exposing good shots alongside the not-so-happy mistakes. The result was very sobering. Along the way themes began to emerge, resulting in some images working better as diptychs. Accompanying the giant contact sheet are a few select images I’ve decided to post, along with 24 prints—the equivalent of one image per roll for each year. The prints were created photo chemically, an increasingly rare process called cibachrome that creates a unique, silver-like quality in the paper. There’s a documentary about Bruce Gilden where he says, “there are two things you don’t do in public: eat lobster and show your contacts”… I’ll avoid the first suggestion.