Scott Hicks

I’ve always enjoyed black and white imagery – from my pre-teen fascination with brass rubbing in English churches, and experimentation with lino cuts, through to my obsession with great woodcut artists.

Picking up a stills camera as a teenager, I learned about lenses, focus, composition, ‘reading’ light and telling stories through juxtaposition of images within the bounds of a frame – all vital tools of film directing. Expanding my ‘visual literacy’, the darkroom also became my quiet zone, a place of solitude, reflection, contemplation – an escape  from all the intensity of collaboration that is filmmaking. It’s a great relief not to have to answer any questions but your own.

Though nothing can replace the rituals of the darkroom – the red glow, images floating mysteriously into view – transitioning to the digital world has enabled me to explore my celluloid archive anew, to reimagine and reinvent images from the past fifty years.  Scott Hicks, artist.

Photograph by Steven Laxton