Brooklyn, N.Y. pro William Castellana has made powerful B&W images from humble items such as lightbulbs, metal scraps, gloves and currency. He generously shared his work and his thoughts about these strong, intensely B&W photos. (Regular readers know we’re partial to photographs that include human figures or other life forms, so for bwphotopro.com to feature tabletop work, it has to be quite striking.)

How much of your work in is B&W? 

I'd say 50% is B&W, since I always shoot in color for my commercial clients.

 

What does working in B&W mean to you?

I prefer B&W imagery because its tones are more akin to musical scale. Tonality becomes a very sensual and important tool for expressing mood in black-and-white photographs and I feel more comfortable in its monochromatic space. However, that's not to say I don't enjoy making color pictures.

 

Where do you find inspiration? Who are you photo heroes?

One of the most awe-inspiring photographs I remember coming across was Alvin Langdon Coburn’s photo of the Flatiron Building, 1912. After viewing his picture, I had the vicarious pleasure of feeling as if every blade of grass in the universe had been perfectly placed and that there was nothing more beautiful than his interpretation of an early evening cityscape. Pictures like Coburn’s, as well as those captured by Alfred Stieglitz, namely, his cloud photographs titled the Equivalent series, would stick in my mind and influence my imagery especially when I was out at night making pictures of the Brooklyn landscape. I favored making pictures that were dark in nature similar to how one writer describes Josef Sudek’s work as being full of mystery and darkness by playing on the lower tones of the photographic scale. 

Today, the photographs that interest me the most are the ones that are abstract or somewhat conceptual in nature. Hiroshi Sujimoto’s pictures of art deco theaters and Ablerado Morell’s camera obscura photographs are fine examples of this. 

Hiroshi Sujimoto once asked himself, “What would a feature-length exposure of a projected movie look like on eight-by-ten film?” Abelardo Morell considered a similar but different question, “What would the optical phenomenon of a site-specific camera obscura look like when captured on film?”  I posited similar “what if” questions while experimenting with backgrounds which would later become the reflective stage for several of my light bulb photographs.

Technical: camera, lenses, film, digital or darkroom approach & materials.

For both my commercial and fine art work, I use a Canon EOS 5D MARK II digital SLR camera and alternate between 2 Canon lenses; a 17-40mm 1:4 L USM lens and a 100mm 1:2.8 Macro EF lens.

In the studio, I like to use Profoto strobes but for location I prefer the very capable white lightning strobes made by Paul C .Buff.

I often use regular incandescent light bulbs fitted with reflectors to light some of my B&W pictures.

All of my work is processed in Photoshop. For the most part, 95% of my B&W images are straight photographs. In this digital age, it’s hard not to become part of the “Lightroom” revolution where printing a fine archival print can happen with the ease of pressing a button. My photographic work employs these new digital technologies, however, my picture-making process hasn’t changed since everything I do to my B&W images can also be done in a wet darkroom. 

I process the original Canon RAW files in Photoshop and then save a .PSD file. After cleaning up the file for dust, I make some local and global contrast adjustments and then get ready for my first proof. All of my B&W prints are printed on Epson's Velvet fine Art paper using the Epson R2880 printer with Ultrachrome inks.

For my B&W still-life work I alternate between different types of lights and set-ups since the realization of the idea is contingent upon choosing a certain type of light and technique. For example, in the light bulb series I employ a technique known as "painting with light". In the image titled, Homage to Thomas Edison, I hand-held one incandescent light bulb, housed in its reflector, and moved it around during a long exposure. Similarly, “Face Study #4” employs this same long exposure technique, however, three lights have been used instead of one, turning each one on, and off, at different intervals while moving the lights around to different locations to achieve the desired lighting effect. In addition to painting with light, I often also use the light source as a picture detail. For example, in “Face Study #1,” the 2 incandescent light sources have painted their reflections onto the light bulb glass creating the illusion that a semblance of face has somehow appeared. My inspiration for the light bulb series came from two sources; the imminent reality that the incandescent light bulb might soon be phased out being replaced by the more eco friendly  fluorescent bulb, and from Edward Weston’s exclamation, regarding his famous pepper series, “It is classic, completely satisfying – a pepper – but more than a pepper: abstract, in that it is completely outside subject matter.”

When I start working on an idea I like to keep intent open-ended, since the creative process willingly invites new ways of seeing and interpreting. For example, when I started the light bulb project it wasn't my initial intention to make some of these light bulbs look face-like. I only started to notice this abstract and vestigial quality as I was allowing the lights to reflect into the light bulb glass. It was at that moment I realized the brain’s overly eager propensity to see a face when it sees two circles spaced appropriately within another larger curvilinear shape. As the project progressed, I experimented with different lighting sources in order to achieve the desired effect. It was a long and laborious journey.

My light bulb photographs do not attempt to create a dialog about the potential transition from incandescent bulb to fluorescent bulb -instead, what I’m interested in is transforming the “quintessence of the thing itself” - abstracting it from its familiar and functional role. The lights bulbs in front of my lens take center stage as light prop.

I think what fascinates me the most is the object itself and not necessarily its function especially when it's in front of my lens. These objects become metaphors; a block of ice becomes a mountain, a light bulb transposes from something concrete into something abstract, a discarded aluminum scrap becomes a gestural expression for the object’s elegant flow. This recontextualisation is what gives these objects a new sense of purpose for me. 

 

Here's some info on some of my images:

Glove series   

I photographed many different types of gloves ranging from the typical yellow household glove to the standard surgical glove, but none of these satisfied the special quality of light that was needed. Luckily, I was able to find these unusual household gloves at the .99 cents store that had the exact properties I was looking for. Their diaphanous quality was a perfect fit for my project since I was filling these so-called containers with water. I destroyed many gloves during this journey towards perfection, or at least what I considered perfect in hopes of metaphorically communicating the transient stages of death as it might befall upon an inanimate object.

"$20" & “American Bill Design”

I took this picture in the early ‘90s when I was in college. One of my professors, John Cohen, had arranged a private showing of Abelardo Morrell's work and I became fascinated with some of the images Abe was making of books. So shortly thereafter, I made a photo of a $20 dollar bill. I decided to crumble the note, and to my surprise I noticed this unusual face staring back at me. The currency seemed to take on new form as a result of the paper's distortion. I crumbled the paper because I thought it might be interesting to photograph something that seemed to be found or discarded, since discarded items are usually more interesting than freshly made things, in that, they reveal the effects of time and experience. When I look at the crumbled currency now, it does make me think that the item is ready for the garbage, hence having no value, since this is what we do with paper before we relegate it to the trash. Oddly enough, Abelardo Morrell started to make his own pictures of money 7-8 years later.

My original photo of the $20 bill did inspire me to make a more surrealistic interpretation of the American note 10 years later. I was interested in sandwiching visual elements form the front, and back, of a $20 bill simultaneously so that they existed together, at once. In my image titled, "American Bill Design" the spoon becomes a metaphor for the president's portrait while the out-of-focus columns allude to recognizable American structures, such as the US Treasury and White House.

Swirl Series (aka Scrap Studies)

I have these aluminum surfaces that I use for some of my commercial photos and sometimes I need to cut the surfaces down to exact sizes. As I was discarding the scraps, I noticed how beautiful they were and how they reminded me of many things like graffiti's elegant line, or the tightly-wound wood shavings falling from a carpenter's plane. I decided to retrieve the scraps from the trash and photograph them on the same surface from which they were cut. In retrospect, I often think of Francis Brugiere's cut paper abstractions when I look at the swirl series even though the imagery is quite different.

http://www.blurb.com/bookstore/detail/1450109

www.williamcastellanaphoto.com

www.williamcastellana.com/gallery

At Right: “$20”

Below, left: “Glove Study #1”

Below, right: “American Bill Design”

Below, left: “Glove Study #5”; At right: “Homage to Thomas Edison”

At right: “Face Study #1”

Below, right: “Kent Ave., Williamsburg, Brooklyn”

Below, “Self Portrait,”

also:

“Ice Study #1,” Ice Study #4” and “Scrap Study #5”