Sabrina Guitart

Sabrina Guitart is a dedicated B&W film photographer and filmmaker who divides her time between her hometown of Barcelona, Spain and Portland, Oregon.

We think her B&W photography is terrific, and love her dedication to film photography. She shared her thoughts on her work:

I am a visual artist. I do documentary film, photography and writing. I started with photography 15 years ago. I had a darkroom and began exploring black & white photography. Since then, I have not been able to let go of it. Photography is a big part of my artistic expression. I am not a professional photographer, although I have photographed events, models, etc.

Throughout the years I’ve had many photography exhibitions in galleries and establishments from Portland, OR. to Barcelona, Spain.

I am very devoted to photography, and I spend a lot of my time and energy photographing and printing images that I hope will inspire and create a meaningful connection between the viewer and the image itself.

Most of my work is in black & white. That’s how I started, and then photography took me to cinematography. I also like exploring color photography, but I prefer to print my own photographs, which is what I do when I am in Portland, OR. There is a fantastic place, You-Develop, where you can do your own color printing.

In photography I seek the poetic, ancestral and sensual beauty of life. With black & white I find more options for that hidden poetic imagery that often becomes buried underneath an obvious and more approachable reality.

The human landscape intrigues me. The expressions and vicissitudes of human life seem more revealing when you don’t have the distraction of colors.

Black and white images seem to have the ability to retain a moment that is suspended between the past and the present. Light comes from dark, and it is that original essence, the ancestral dimension that I am driven to find. Through black and white, I am more able to capture the reverie of life and enter through the threshold that leads into a bare, honest expression and sentiment of existence.

I find inspiration in the images of artistic cinema. The imagery in films inspires me photographically speaking as much or even more than the work of other photographers. The reason is because even though I love very much the work of Salgado, Brassai, Newton, they are already unchangeable, unmovable and I can love and admire their photography very much, but it is in some of those art films that I find the space between movement for my own personal creation to arise.

I use a 35mm Nikon FM 1. The lenses are 28mm, 35mm and 200mm. For film I use Ilford, sometimes Kodak, and I print on Ilford fiber paper.

In Spain I have the same darkroom I had since I was 15. I also use two darkrooms in Portland. OR.; Newspace for black & white and You-Develop for color.

I wouldn’t say that black & white photography is popular in Spain. In Portland, OR. I found more of an interest in black & white photography than in Spain. There are definitely people in Portland who appreciate it very much and find a lot of artistic value in it.

I am very glad that there are places such as the bwphotopro.com webzine that focus on this art form. The work this webzine publishes has a lot of quality, and I am honored to have my work to be part of it.

I don’t think that black & white photography should ever be abandoned or completely replaced by digital photography. They both share the content, the light, the composition, and they both have their advantages and disadvantages, and each one adapts better for one or another circumstance. The intention and the expression are similar, but what they evoke is different from another, perhaps is the immediacy versus the timeless feeling.

See more of here work at: http:/sabrinaguitart.blogspot.com/