Students of Light

I almost dismissed this guy, Misha Burlatsky, after having poked through the better part of his site, then I found these. His still life work has a vivid and graphic sense with soft light splashes falling across the items, often with a painterly effect. To balance this, in some work he blasts with hard light to show wood or peeling paint textures, like the black and white of the half fish on the cutting block. At first I wasn't impressed with his portraits and people work in general, then I noticed the second half of his site with his ambrotype work. This is the same process that Sally Mann uses, involving creating large negatives on sheets of glass that must then be quickly processed. The nature of the processing is what gives that scratchy look to the images. I found his portrait work in this section of the website was much more to my liking. Check it out!