Profiles

[Right: Nottinghill Carnival]

'Big company commissions avant garde artist to create immense panoramic photographs using its latest technology.' - Hardly sounds remarkable does it? But when the artist is well known for championing the aesthetic virtues of low resolution cameras, and when the imaging technology in question is Nokia's 7610 phonecam, then you know you aren't dealing with just another run-of-the-mill technology PR piece.

Henry Reichold started playing with cameras as a child, but he really got started in photography when he was about 12. His interest played a key role in his subsequent decision to go to art school. After finishing a three-year program, he went into the advertising industry where he continued to work in photography.

In 1988 he had his first encounter with digital imaging in the form of a Canon colour photocopier, which he says, 'was a marvel at the time. I did a shoot for the Hard Rock Cafe and then I changed the colour [with the Canon]. It was probably one of the first digital images to go on the cover of a photography magazine.'

By that stage, the Apple Macintosh computer was revolutionising the print production side of the advertising business. The ripples of change were also beginning to be felt in photography, with the appearance of the first image manipulation software tools. Making the transition to digital was comparatively easy for Reichold. 'I worked for a guy named David Fairman and he'd shoot everything on colour neg and use these weird processes so that he could print on 5x4 film. Sometimes I had to do 45 different exposures on one piece of film with colour changes and so on. By the time two years is up with that and the computer came along - it seemed quite simple!'

Manumision Party, Ibiza

A Photoshop user since version 1.5 appeared in about 1990, Reichold has honed his digital photo manipulation skills in both the professional and artistic realms. By the time he picked up a two megapixel HP camera and turned it on the sweating denizens of an all night dance party, he was a master digital collage artist who happily worked on a very large scale. His Manumision Party, Ibiza (above) is a huge work. Around four feet tall and some 18 feet long, it is a collage of around 250 images - selected from 600 he shot on the evening.

Given his long standing interest in low resolution photographic tools (as well as the Impressionist and Pointillist movements),  it was almost a foregone conclusion that he'd be drawn to the digital age's equivalent of the Brownie - namely the phone camera. 'About a year and a half ago, I did a project for Nokia. My real pet interest has been low resolution images and I felt this was something I really wanted to do.'

One of the first things he did for the project was to shoot a pop festival with Nokia 7600 and 7610 mobile phones. 'It was great fun. You were in the pit with all the other photographers. They have these huge lenses and I'm waving this little plastic thing at people. The crowd loved it. They thought it was hilarious that I was there with it. The people who were controlling the crowds wanted to shoo me out because I wasn't a serious photographer.'

'The phone camera was ideal because I've always been interested in low resolution techniques. I was interested particularly in the Impressionists and how they looked at colour. The dots were very visible and it soon became very apparent to me that if you actually try to hide the content or the make up of the image, then you lose a huge amount. When you start mixing very grainy and smooth bits together, then you start creating pictures that wouldn't normally be possible. So it was a new world, especially when you blow them up so that you can actually see the pixels. When they get to about three foot by four foot they start looking really very interesting. '

On the technique side, he says that to construct composites from phonecam images, he likes to overlap adjacent photos by 30 to 50 percent. 'I think that's the best way to deal with the convergence. I don't use Stitch or anything like that', he adds. 'You start with one layer and the secret is using Edit/Transform/Distort but also using the History brush. If you start off with one image and create a blank space around it and save that as a history state, then whatever you overlap, you can use the History brush to bring back the original background and blend it in that way. It's a very simple technique, but very effective.'

Reichold uses basic Photoshop tools such as Smudge and the filter options to obtain a distinctive combination of sharp and soft areas in this images. As the photographs reproduced here show, the effects range from the very subtle to the almost abstract. He also likes to use a mixture of greyscale and colour to highlight or otherwise bring forward particular areas or elements within a picture.

He owns a couple of large format inkjet printers and in addition to using conventional printing papers for his work, he also likes to use materials such as Egyptian cotton. For the original Nokia exhibition, the work was printed on extremely hard wearing floor covering material. 'It actually managed to survive a few weeks on the floor of a very busy nightclub', Reichold says.

When Photo Review caught up with Henry Reichold, he had three different projects in various stages of development. As well, he intersperses this work with teaching at St Martin's College in London. 'I started doing one project a year, but I'm doing more and more and they're getting larger and larger.' And when he says 'large', he means it.

'I'm putting up an exhibition at Gatwick Airport and the images are going to be very, very long.' They are designed, he says, to be viewed as you are carried along the concourse on a moving walkway. 'That's actually going to be the perfect spot because it's going to be up for a year and will be seen by 4.6 million people. Anyone who comes to this country from the USA will have to go past it.' The photographs are narratives. 'There's very much a beginning and a middle and an end. And it's very much designed for which way the audience is moving.'

As this article was being written, Reichold was anxiously waiting to get his hands on the very latest high tech phonecam from Nokia - the two megapixel, Carl Zeiss lens-equipped N90. Interested as he is in the higher resolution of the new phone's still camera, the reason he's particularly excited is that the device is also capable of capturing 352 x 416 pixel video. He plans to use it to shoot a movie on the antics of Parkour afficionados he's previously photographed with his 7610.

As for the future, well Reichold has an idea in mind for photographing Europe itself. He says that if all goes to plan, he'll need more than one concourse at Gatwick because the work will be designed to be exhibited across 'two to three kilometres' of viewing space.

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