Fine art photography is the print. Every thing that the photographer wants you to know about the subject is contained on a piece of paper. Each of my photographs is a graphic presentation of my vision. When I’m shooting black and white film, everything in the world is reduced to black, white, and every tone in between.      All that is encoded into this document has the potential to last centuries. While the process of making it is gone forever, the communication between the subject and the viewer remains. The photographer may be long gone, the camera obsolete, the process lost, and now all the excitement is about what is presented in the print.      I shoot at the edge of bright light, using incidental or reflected lighting. I choose to work with available light, because it produces such a rich, continuous tonality in the photograph. I like to make it as lush and gorgeous as I possibly can. Sometimes that means sparkly greys, and sometimes it means a lot of black. The key to the print is the quality of the captured light, graphically imaged in silver gelatin.      Finally, the viewer’s ambient lighting strikes the silver print, and illuminates the original scene. This is the photograph’s moment. In the end, it’s a little like alchemy or hocus-pocus. For me, all the elements add together and compound. It’s chemistry, and it’s also magic.

~ Jim Stipovich, photographer