Like all the photographers here, Sontier has worked extensively with film-based materials. Recently, his interest has turned to the material nature of digital tools and in this series he uses very old phone cameras specifically to investigate the digital nature of their imaging. Visually the images depend on the inability of early digital technology to live up to the hyped nature of their output. The subject matter is apparently immaterial until you notice references to other photographers encapsulated in images, from Anna Atkins to Wolfgang Tillmans and Uta Barth… [read essay]
These camera-phones crunch the dynamic range, where anything aproaching a highlight is thrown into stark white and shadow detail disappears into the grain of pixel dust. Detail gets stripped back, and so such cameras favour the smoothed out image, and Sontier makes use of this to abstract, allowing specular highlights to add to this abstraction… [read essay]