Michael
Massaia developed a terrible case of insomnia. In order to give himself a break
from sitting around all night he took his camera along, creating an amazing series
“Deep in a Dream, Central Park” and gave us wonderful pictures of New York city during the darkest nights!
“I have a really obsessive mind so I got into
the technical aspect of [photography],” he said. “I went immediately into
large-format photography, and I started modifying my own cameras, building my
own printing equipment, and when I started out I was doing pretty much all
analog printing.”
His landscapes
of New York and New Jersey have extremely rich black-and-white tones due to his
processing techniques.
The artist shoots with slow black-and-white film and develops
with a stain developer called Pyro that many people don’t like to use anymore
because of its toxicity. What it creates, however, are images with long tonal
scales (rich blacks and whites) in the negatives, which Massaia then scans to
create a series of internegatives and masks, which are eventually printed on
white Mylar sheets.
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