Next up in our interview series is Jesse Swallow, known to many as mugley on flickr.

thoughtcrime

Please introduce yourself. Hi, my name is Jes and I’m an alchoholic. Oh wait, wrong interview

what is “your style” of photography? I suppose it’s high-contrast, low-glamour, non-documentary depictions of city life. I’m trying to move away from representational architectural and street photography, and attempting to evoke the human experience of living in an urban environment… eg the claustrophobia of tall buildings pressing down on you from above, or the loneliness of an empty nocturnal alley. Even the more recent staged surreal stuff, it’s still anchored heavily in the city scenery, and dealing with themes like sex and death – concepts that are hard to explore through straight shots of buildings and people, hence the need for the odd prop or two.

how long have you been shooting film? Only a couple of years. I was never much into photography earlier in life, preferring to draw or etch. Without digital, I don’t think I would’ve ever gotten hooked on cameras. Eventually I got the urge to play with new toys, try new looks and exploit new capabilities, and here we are.

do you prefer colour or black & white? do you have a favourite film or camera? Black and white by day, colour at night. I like using the softness and grain of Rollei R3 to take the edge off a sharp, contrasty daytime cityscape and bring an organic feel to scenery that can otherwise suffer from a kind of modern sterility. At night, I want to see colours – the orange of sodium vapour lamps, the green of flourescent lights, bright splashes of colour against darkness. Been using a lot of Fuji Reala 100 for long exposures lately – the reciprocity is decent, colours are as vivid as I need and the latitude saves me from slaughtering highlights under harsh artificial lighting. It’s got a really nice grain structure for a colour film too, and renders pinks and greens beautifully. Favourite camera at the moment would be the Mamiya 645 Pro TL. It’s got a really good balance between image quality and portability, and between control and automation. And being able to shoot on medium format with a standard lens that’s reliable at f/1.9 opens up whole new possibilities for being able to isolate a subject while giving it plenty of room in the frame, not to mention having the capability to shoot handheld in dingy lanes.

I don’t belong here

show us one of your favourite shots and tell us a bit about it, how did you take it and is there a story behind it? This one started with conversations with Flickr friends about photographing beached jellyfish. My fascination with dead animal photos combined with a moment of drunken inspiration, and the next thing I know, a friend and I are on the city-bound tram from South Melbourne beach with a dead jellyfish in a Tupperware container. Previous experience shooting vomit and other pavement objects proved invaluable here. We found a grimy lane and unloaded the subject. After shooting the majority of a roll, something was missing though. Turns out the missing element was a sympathetic perspective. Had to take the camera off the tripod and lie on the grotty ground with it to get the jelly-eye view, but I was happy with the result.

an untitled photo by burntfilm.

show us a favourite shot from the MSM pool. What do you enjoy in other peoples’ photos? I really like this shot by Rob “burntfilm” Young. I’m not usually a fan of cross-processed photos, but in this case the colour actually adds to the image. And the fact that it’s exposed and focused properly, as well as composed thoughtfully, makes it stand out from the sloppy lomographic rubbish that it shares some minor stylistic similarities with. Bonus points for the heroic light, and for finding an original take on a subject that we’ve all had a go at. And in the end, that’s what I’m looking for in other people’s photos. Some originality, some inspiration, a rise above the limitations of equipment and convention. And a bit of bright cheeriness, especially in the context of the MSM pool. Too often we (myself included) fall into the trap of producing a standard style of moody, bleak, hyper-serious “Melbourne” photography. So when a photographer breaks out of that mould, it gives me something to smile about.

Is there something that motivates and inspires you in particular with your photography? Inspiration’s a funny thing, it tends to come in random and unpredictable bursts. But even without specific inspiration there’s always a constant creative-compulsive itch that needs to be scratched. If it wasn’t the photos, it’d be sketching, or altering song lyrics, of finger-painting with faeces, or something else. On second thought, maybe not the finger-painting. Because I’ve historically not been interested in photography as an artform, I get far more inspiration from the work of Flickr contacts than from any of the Great Masters of Photography. OK, so I stole some ideas on landscape technique from Ansel Adams, but that’s about it. I’d probably struggle to name ten famous photographers. Most of my creative inspiration comes from other kinds of visual artist – the surreal paintings of a Dali, Bosch, or Giger, WD Barlowe’s alien illustrations, Nancy Wolf’s dysfunctional city sketches, or the obscene cartooning of Mike Diana and S. Clay Wilson.

winterscape #6

What is it that you like about shooting film, as opposed to digital, apart from technical reasons such as latitude, etc? Damn, I think most of the reasons are technical… and latitude is the main one.

There’s the look thing – the colour depth of a good slide film, the grain of an old-school black and white, the imperfections in old or plastic lenses – but those are really just technical features interpreted into aesthetic preferences. I’m not into home developing or darkroom work, so I can’t say it’s a preference for traditional processes. And I don’t buy into that idea that having to wait to see photos is somehow fun, or makes one a better photographer. I’d much rather see results instantly and be able to improve via a feedback loop.

The only non-technical thing that comes to mind is being able to use a variety of different camera designs. In digital, you’ve got the automatic point ‘n shoot, the 35mm and MF SLR equivalents, and a few minor variations in between. Maybe one day there’ll be digital equivalents of box cameras, TLRs, plastic pano-cams and 4×5 view cameras, but in the meantime having such diversity of design is a film-only thing. That’s a love-of-gear reason though, which is the sort of thing we’re always criticising digital photographers for.

The smell of old cameras – does that count?

Give us a question to ask the next person for this series. Your house is on fire. You only have one camera. It’s rare, expensive and uninsured, and it’s the only camera you’ve ever enjoyed shooting with. You have time to save either it or all your negatives. Save the camera and you lose irreplaceable images, save the negatives and you may never be happy taking photos again. Which do you choose, and why?

Thanks for your time, Jes! You can find him on flickr as mugley, and will be able to see his work up on the wall as part of the UNSENSORED09 in August.