Olivier Pin-Fat. In Bangkok. Outdated medium format colour films, along with 35mm monochrome films of various kinds. Embracing the accidental. The damage. The entropic surge.
His practice is all about the physicality of the materials he uses. Manipulating the films before and after the darkroom, in the end he prints what he feasibly can, what is “given” to him by his process.
As he puts it: “The scratches on the negatives are random, they’re not forced or designed, it’s not artifice, it comes from when I hang wet film and stroke the negatives all the way down in a streak with two fingers to get excess water off for more effective drying after a painfully rigorous developing process for the emulsions.”
Those “broken” photos suit perfectly this ‘Bangkok’ series, a city that according to Pin-Fat “it’s frayed, it’s choked, it’s bestial, it’s repetitive, it’s looped, it’s endless, it’s addictive, you smoke it and it smokes you, it’s an animal trap, it’s compelling chaos, it’s bait, it’s hunter, it’s life and it’s doom, it’s all teeth and jowls – a place to get lost in and in so doing have segments or steaks of meat bitten and torn out of you forever, or if not pieces, then your entirety.”
