Saltself

John Savoia

Interview by L. Valena
January 13, 2024

Can you please describe the prompt that you responded to?

I responded to two images of a highly decorated mirror. Most of the mirror had been covered in accoutrements, but enough was left that you could see a reflection of the artist in both pictures.

What were your first thoughts and feelings about them?

The first thing I thought was, "Oh cool, a self-portrait." I also work in self-portraiture quite often, and I have been very interested in what I call ‘muddying up’ the image, adding texture and layers of abstraction in the image that sort of obscure and abstract the pictures I'm making. It felt like this person had done something very similar, or I was reading it through that lens. They were taking this object, which would reflect them in totality, and adding all of these beautiful bits and baubles to it that became part of the piece while still allowing the reflection to be part of it.

Cool. Where did you go from there?

There's this technique that I use called an accelerated lumen process, where a chemical accelerant is added to a paper negative, which speeds up what is normally an extremely slow process. On a bright sunny day, an exposure that might take eight or nine hours might only take a few minutes with an accelerant. Doing a self-portrait or doing portraits in general is still very, very slow with this process, but I've been experimenting with it. How thickly I dilute the accelerant causes different textures to appear on the image. Most recently, I've been adding salt both to the accelerant and directly cracking salt onto the resulting paper negative as it dries, which does seem to add some sort of texture. It sort of exposes the paper in a way that I'm not entirely in control of. Upon seeing the prompt, I pretty quickly made the jump that I wanted to create a self-portrait using this technique, that would be equally as abstracted and muddied up as the reference material that I was responding to.

Tell me more about this concept of 'muddying up' the image. When did you start to become interested in that?

As a photographer, pretty early on I wanted to embrace imperfections. Photography can be a very technically-minded medium, and people will obsess over really minute parts of the image. Sharpness, resolution, and color fidelity. I always felt that, while there is a time and place for that, it often sort of misses the point. There have been times in my life that I've really looked for ways to not just disregard that seeking of technical perfection, but to actively work in the other direction.

At the beginning of every year, I look back at all the work I've made in the past year. I just finished that for 2024, and really felt like I had sort of lost my way in that sense and that I had been seeking forms of technical perfection or moving towards the more 'clean' images that I just wanted to make a conscious break from. When I first got into photography, I was inspired by a quote from one of my favorite photographers, Daidō Moriyama, which translates to, "I want to make nasty photographs." That was my mantra as a young street photographer, and it's my mantra again now much later, and with a much different idea of what that means for my photography.

What kind of camera did you use to take this picture?

This is a homemade camera. It is a large-format camera that uses a four-by-five-inch negative. Back in the 90s, there were these enormous TVs called rear-projection TVs. It was the only way you could make a big 40 or 50 inch TV, and they were huge. They were very deep, and I don't know entirely how they work, but they had a lens that would project an image onto the screen. These lenses can be pulled out of the trash or bought on eBay, and I have one. It is the perfect lens for this sort of idea of a muddy image. It's very unsharp, it lets a lot of light in. It has a lot of aberrations and there's no possibility of technical perfection with this lens. This is a camera cobbled together around that lens.

You sent two images. Are these the negative and positive of the image?

Yes, I'm not sure if the prompt I responded to was two different views of one piece, or if it was a diptych, but I decided I wanted to respond with a diptych. When I'm using this accelerated lumen technique, I almost always invert the negative and consider the positive to be the final piece. But honestly, the negatives are also very beautiful in themselves. There are colors and textures on the negative that I think get lost in the positive, and there are certain elements of the positive… Well, there's a reason that I generally like the positives more. In this case, holding this negative in my hand and looking at it, I knew I wanted it to be part of the final piece. I wanted people to see this part too, which is why I included it.

And you're doing all this developing and processing at home, right?

Yeah. The accelerant is mixed at home and painted onto the negative. It's a chemical developer-free process, so there is no chemical development. The image is formed on the paper because of the light that is hitting the paper. You take the paper out of the camera, and you can see the negative image immediately. It's a latent image, it just needs to be rinsed off and dried. That's when the salt happens. I guess you could say there is a chemical developing moment because I'm adding the chemical NaCl. But yeah, it's all happening at home. Once it's dried, it's scanned, and once scanned it can be inverted.

Do you have any idea where you're going with this body of work?

I know that I want to continue to explore it and I want to do more portraiture. The thing I forgot to mention is this was a 20-minute exposure, so I had to sit still for 20 minutes. I was worried there wouldn't be enough light, so set up one of my camera flashes to my left. I was holding the trigger, sort of cupped behind my hands (not that there's enough resolution in the image to see that), and I would just press it as often as the flash would go off. It died about 15 minutes in. Then I waited another five minutes. I had my phone timer going out of camera view and occasionally would just look over, but I was trying to maintain relative stillness. I would like to do more portraits with this. I would like to find people who are willing to sit for 10 or 20 minutes when there's enough light and do more portraits with this technique. Separately, I would like to also find more ways of muddying the image up, and see what layers of abstraction I can achieve while also making a recognizable image of a subject.

I think a lot of people consider photography to be a medium filled with inherent truth. I reject that. I think that every photograph is a composition formed with a mission. You're always choosing what not to include in the frame just as much as what you do include in the frame. Even taking these alternative processes like I'm doing, there's an immense amount of abstraction that's possible through things like low (or no) resolution, through the abstraction of photochemical grain or digital noise, through the abstraction of the focus being not on your subject. I think that there is a lot of abstraction possible in the medium, despite this idea that photographs are truth and always show the world as it is. I think that within that, there is a lot of interesting potential.

Is there anything we haven't talked about that you want to talk about?

I think I touched on it a little bit, but it's just very exciting to have achieved a reasonable facsimile of myself in what is, for this technique, a very short period of time. For the patience of the sitter, it's sort of a long period of time. This is just a proof of concept, both for the layers of dirtying up the frame as well as the technical possibility of potential for someone to sit still for 20 minutes. I've taken enough self-portraits that I look at this and think, "Yeah, looks like me," even though there's not really a lot of distinguishing features available. When I can see that, even if it's sort of in a very small, nuanced way, it means to me that there's a potential to say something about another person through portraiture, which is exciting.

Do you have any advice for another artist approaching this project for the first time?

I think one of my favorite things about Bait/Switch is to use it as a chance to just try things that you've been interested in, that you haven't found a chance to do. If there's something that you've been wanting to play with or experiment with, or some fanciful flight that you haven't gotten around to, this is the time to do it. Do something that may look iterative or look wholly different from how your work normally does, and do so with all the confidence in the world, and just see where it takes you.

Call Number: R97VA | R98VA.saSa

John Savoia is a photographer working with large format and long exposures in the Greater Boston area. His work seeks to compress long swaths of time into single frames, as well as explore seldom used analog processes.