Sam Cornwell

Sam Cornwell is a British photographer who visited our college earlier this year to do a presentation, he showed us how older cameras work (wet plate collodion) which I found quite interesting. He also showed us some examples of wet plate collodion printed on metal, which were of portraits. I found looking at his work interesting as well, his photography changed a lot in his work over time and he did not just work in only one branch of photography.

 I decided to write about one of his earlier photographs because I liked how he had created and planned it. The photograph is this one, of which he has included many images (paintings and photographs) in a street and made one large photograph altogether, it took him hours to get right and I can see why. He had to get the colour right and too check that the image looked in the right order, so he could correctly get the smaller pictures into the focus. I don’t know how he decided on how this would work. I like this image from its use of colours which work well together. I also liked how he used large and small images to build this up the photograph. The subject matter of the pictures within in the photograph are all form different subjects and topics, so this makes the viewer look closely. There is no centre where the eye leads as there are so many colours and topics to focus on just one.

I learnt a lot from Sam Cornwall's talk, I learnt how as a photographer, it was not just about taking pictures but also coming up with ideas.