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| I came to photography in my mid-twenties, and so
have now been photographing for thirty-five years. (Work it out)! At thirty
I took a Degree in Communications Studies at University of London Goldsmiths
College. Goldsmiths has an excellent drama department, and as a neighbour
had the Laban Centre London, one of the most respected Contemporary Dance
schools in the UK. So I started photographing both dance and drama in the
early eighties. In the years to follow it was dance that would intrigue
and challenge, although I continued working in theatre and opera, and
when the bank balance demanded took on more lucrative work for industry
clients. (For more information check out the on-line CV). |
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| In the year that I graduated I returned to Goldsmiths to teach
part-timein the Communications Department. For several years I continued
to work as a freelance in theatre and dance whilst teaching at Goldsmiths',
and in 1989 I transferred to teach at the then Ealing College. Ealing College
used to host the Ealing School of Photography, but by the time I arrived this
had been reduced to a hot and smelly cupboard which was a health and safety
disaster. In a relatively short time Bill Blanco and myself had built from
scratch a new darkroom facility, to which we later added studios and imaging labs, and 7 additional staff. TVU now offers short courses, a BA and an MA to up to 200 students. In 1992 Ealing College evolved into Thames
Valley University (TVU). I retired from TVU in 2010. |
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| The process of change for Ealing College was mirrored by changes
for photography as a medium. For one hundred and fifty years the actual
process of image capture and production had changed very little. It involved
light travelling through a lens system, controlled via time and volume,
and recorded onto a photosensitive media. For the photographer and teacher
the challenge came from getting better at this process, and experimenting
with variations in chemical, film and paper relationships. This was usually
a leisurely process that took place in the dark, often in isolation, with
the stereo on, etc. Photographers belonged to a select group who had control of this magical process. |
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| And it is a magical process, because for all
the people who took photographs, only those initiated into the darkroom
rituals actually made photographs. The introduction of a system that apparently
exposed this process to all, and took place on a machine, in daylight, without
chemistry or even any of the proper initiation rites, was abhorrent! Believe
me that was the attitudes of many and the letters pages of the various journals
were full of exclamations of horror when digital photography came on the scene. And this is where we now are - attempting to align creativity to a process that has parameters defined by software engineers, which occurs by courtesy of a computer chip. Modestly, we are being remarkably successful. |
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email: tonynandi@btinternet.com |
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