SELWORTH Order a print

About

One person, one darkroom, one format, one toner.

Selworth works from a converted washhouse on the East Riding coast, about four hundred metres from the first of the six series. The camera is a 4×5 field camera, which is slow enough that most days produce nothing and honest enough that the ones that do produce something can be printed at any size.

Everything is made here. Film is developed in the same room the prints are washed in, on a schedule set by the tide rather than by a diary. That is the whole operation: there is no assistant, no lab, and no second darkroom.

What stays fixed

  • One negative format, 4×5. Two frames, landscape and upright, and no crops.
  • One paper, fibre base, in four grades.
  • One toner, selenium at 1:20, six minutes, every print without exception.
  • One reference print per series, untoned, kept so the toning can be checked.

What it will not do

No weddings, no portraits, no commercial location work, and no digital files supplied. A print is the finished object; a scan of a print is a picture of one. Commissions are taken for landscape work on this coast when the subject is somewhere I would have gone anyway, which is a narrower offer than it sounds.

Where

The darkroom, Wrackholme, East Riding. Visits by arrangement, and only on dry days: the darkroom is also the drying room and an open door costs a print.

Order a print
An upright close frame of a rotted piling head, splintered timber and a rusted iron band above still water.
Head of the third post Sterne Point April 2023 neg. 4×5 fibre base, grade 3 toner selenium 1:20, 6 min mean chroma 3.48