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NHSPA Member Spotlight: Ian Raymond

8 Oct 2022 5:25 PM | Maundy Mitchell (Administrator)

For this month's blog, we feature NHSPA member and Board President, Ian Raymond.  Ian became a member in 2018 before becoming Vice President and then, in June, President.  He has been a professional photographer for more than forty years.  He runs his studio, Raymond Photography, in downtown Laconia, NH.


What drives you?

"I have been photographing since I was five years old. Even at that age, I think I realized that photography, much like reading, opened up a world of vicarious experiences—the viewer was able to almost “live” the same experience as the photographer had witnessed firsthand. I remember viewing portraits of my grandparents when they were children and fantasizing what life must have been like so long ago. By the age of seven, I had watched my neighborhood friend’s mother making contact prints in her bathroom, and after watching the magic happen in the developer tray, knew that photography was what I wanted to do for a living."



What medium do you like to work with?

"I have worked in media ranging from 35mm, Polaroid, medium format, large format, and ultra large format (an R.R. Robertson camera with a 16”x16” film holder). My work has ranged from fine art portraiture to commercial work including architectural, industrial, studio product photography, and photographing and writing feature stories for magazines. At one point I was shooting well over 500 product photographs per month, all on 4x5 transparency film with a Cambo view camera.  Over the 40-plus years that I have been doing photography professionally, it seems my personal work always veers toward using vintage camera equipment and processes."



What are you working on now?

"I currently have an exhibition (through the month of October) titled "Time Passes Slowly”, hanging at the Belknap Mill in Laconia, NH. It is a collection of this work, fine art portraits, shot on film and paper negatives, using large formatcameras that are 100+ years old. The collection also contains many images printed on albumen paper, a process dating back to the 1850s. I absolutely love the quality of images these primitive lenses are capable of creating. Much of my work was inspired by early photographers such as Julia Margaret Cameron, Gertrude Kasebier, Alfred Stieglitz, Oscar Rejlander, Edward Steichen, and the promotional poster for this exhibit was of course inspired by Man Ray."



What would you like to learn/do next?

"Going forward, I look to expand on this work by photographing a much larger cast of characters, and using other alternative and historical processes such as wet plate collodion."









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