Roadbenders

Nesting has begun in earnest, and I spent the weekend going through my massive camera and photography collection, with the end result that I’ve posted some of my original Polaroid SX-70 manipulations (and some fine art reproductions) for sale on Etsy.

Josh chipped in with a very spiff artist’s bio that I’m reposting here because it’s all true yet sounds so magnificently pro. I’ll be posting more originals and prints for sale over the next week, as well as film and camera packages from my collection. It’s amazing how every camera I inventoried this weekend became MY FAVOURITE CAMERA EVER as long as I was looking at it, only to be replaced in my affections by the next camera in line. I’ve had a lot of good fun with this equipment.

I’ve been creating Polaroid and alternative photography for over a decade, with an ad hoc, photojournalistic approach that makes the creation of each image the experience itself. Here’s my official bio, in official third person:

Brianna Privett blends tradition and technology in her expressive SX-70 manipulations, her classical training married with a real-time sensibility. Brianna studied timeless techniques of photography and oil painting, a foundation above which she layers her seismic sense of modern mechanisms in a connected world.

Like all meaningful art, her work with malleable emulsions is constructed according to its own rules: every piece is unique, developed in the same light the lens captured when the shutter clicked. A kind of plein air Polaroiding. Working with a clear vision against the deadline of Time Zero’s chemical magic, the easel and brushes for each canvas are an improvised element.

Some pictures were painted as the artist leaned against a column in Vatican City to massage colour and line with a silver ring’s edge; others with a crochet hook fished from a friend’s purse when chronicling the surroundings of a favourite coastal café. Such field work has fostered a selectivity among tools for each task. Studio still-lifes are often executed with a treasured set of wooden clay-modelling tools.

With something of the sculptor’s instinct for revealing the image within, Brianna photographs a panoply of places and things, their captured instants the raw material in which she works. From firearms to colonnades, motorcars to antique televisions, every work has something different to say. But they all speak.