About - Out of Focus

I started taking photos in the late sixties of the last century. It was always more than a hobby and never a profession. I did write professionally about art, film and photography for some time in my native country and in my native language. Few years ago, I bought a full frame digital camera with no lens. I had few lenses for a cropped sensor but wouldn't use them. Instead, I started using some of my old analogue [vintage] lenses with this new camera. It was supposed to be a temporary solution, until I saved some money for a “real" lens. Eventually, I did buy a really good lens. But by that time I became so attached to the process of manual focusing, selecting aperture and exposure that my most expensive auto-focus lens was used just for, well, almost nothing. The end result is, what might be called an addiction to creating the photos that do not look like anything I did before.

From there many paths for exploring opened up and collection of analogue, manual, quirky old lenses grow steadily.

For the better part of my life I was shooting on the film. I still do it from time to time. However, digital camera opened up the space for a new ways of exploration. Never before would I be able to shoot a 1000 photos in a day. Digital and analogue workflow differs in some key aspects. With film I always carefully planed what I would shoot. I took good care of focusing, lighting, exposure, composition. I wanted to use every frame from the film roll. With digital camera I do the same but in much more relaxed way. With digital camera one may experiment in camera and take the photos without a fear of failure. No big deal. We simply delete or ignore missed image.

I use vintage lenses for my photographic work. I use all kinds of vintage lenses, not just ones from old film cameras. I use projector, enlarging, industrial and amateur cinema ones. My photography is an exploration of a character, a soul-print, of those lenses. This finishes in all kind of photos in no genre in particular. What most of them have in common, at least ones I keep and cherish, is not high technical image quality but a possibility that they may be a portal toward an invisible world that is not mere reproduction of the one we are in.

What many consider as an error, a fault, for me is not a failure, but a feature. The domain of art is imperfection. At the time when even an entry level phone will make high-definition, sharp and well focused images, making photographs that lack those attributes is not an error. It is a statement.