James Kriszyk

Bio

Throughout my career I have gained a wide ranging and in-depth knowledge and experience of different photographic formats and processes; conventional, alternative and abstract. I am fascinated by the combination of the old and new: the film and the digital; the analog and the binary. The alchemy of image making is and has been a strong thread in my work.
For my current body of work, ‘Brand New Second Hand’, I am shooting on 35mm film and medium format, partially distressing the film using heat, soil and chemicals and then digitalising the images through a hybrid of analogue and binary processes.
‘Brand New Second Hand’ takes us into the underworld of a broken society. Through blistering heat, our surface is broken, our vulnerability revealed. The intensity of the heat burns off layers of the negative and leaves the subject almost unrecognisable. Scarred, faded, and scratched. Distortion reveals the soul of the subject; there is a palpable need for healing.
I spend a lot of time reflecting on where we are as a species; the individual in the group, the group I the individual. Through my photographs I see us standing on the brink of an all-consuming grief, contemplating the bliss of the abyss as we are forced to face our collective trauma.
However, rather than deliver an aching melody through my images, which might threaten to drown the observer in the depths of spontaneous empathy, I try instead to build rhythm by layering and building snapshots of society’s stark portrait of isolation and loneliness. As we alone with everyone.