Interview with Roman Loranc

1. Please introduce yourself

I am a native of southwestern Poland and was born in Bielsko-Biala in 1956 during the communist era there. When I was 26, I immigrated to Madison, Wisconsin (1982) and moved from there to Modesto, California in 1984. Much of my earlier better-known photographic work was created in California’s Central Valley when I lived in Modesto. I moved to Northern California to the Mt. Shasta area in 2006 (?) where I now reside with my 3-year-old German Shepard, “Shasta. ”
I am a full-time traditional black and white photographer and practice the methods used by Edward Weston, Ansel Adams, Morley Baer and others in the ƒ-64 school of photography. My subjects include the landscape, architecture and occasionally people or animals as they are in their environment.

2. How did you get interested in Photography?

When I was very young, 7 or 8-years-old, I was given a small 35mm Druch ( a Polish-made camera which broke in short order after I received it. I still have a few photos I made with it of a little stream near my home) camera as a First Communion gift from my God-parents. A camera was a very valuable gift at that time. I was immediately drawn to the magic of photography with that gift; the ability to slice a moment out of time and hold it as a print in my hands. But that was not all; I soon came to feel a consuming fascination with the chemical photographic process that, after exposure to light and immersion in developer, allowed grains of silver to form first on the negative and then again on a final print. It was pure alchemy to me and it was fun.
At that time in Poland many books were censored and there were not the vast amounts of easily accessed information available to the public that is taken for granted in the United States and has been so vital to the evolution of photography here. At first I learned by doing things on my own. I didn’t have the wonderful books by Ansel Adams, or the technical manuals by Kodak, but what I did have were photography history books that described chemical formulas for developers, stop baths and fixers and with that knowledge I began processing my film and printing my negatives.
A few years later, I developed a friendship with an older neighbor, who also was interested in photography and he taught me how to make glass plates and use a large format camera. That was my first introduction to traditional large format photography. At the time I did not realize the profound influence that time spent with my neighbor would have on my use of a view camera for my work.
When I was 19 I traveled to Russia on holiday where I fell in love with a TTL 35mm camera ( a Russian-made Nikon knock off with a normal lens) and traded a prized pair of Levi’s jeans for it. After that I went around wearing a pair of polyester pants that were much too short looking like an idiot, but it was a good trade because the camera came with a travel case containing an extra lens, enlarger, trays, safelight and chemicals; everything I needed to make prints.

3. Do You have an artistic/photographic background?

No, not at all! My mother worked at home and for the government in a factory and my father was a factory manager. In Poland one considered careers that were necessary and practical and which offered the promise of continued employment in the communist economy. Art and photography had their
place in society, but they were not generally acknowledged as safely reliable careers. Consequently my parents were not encouraging toward my photography as a means of making a living, instead I went to a technical university where I learned food processing and earned the equivalent of a Bachelor’s Degree.

4. Which Artist/Photographer inspired your art?

So many people ask me that question. Growing up in Poland I was surrounded by many centuries of artistic architecture and art in its’ many forms. The craftsmen of prior centuries put beauty into the functional articles they produced, so even useful things I was seeing daily had an artistic nature to them. I became accustomed to seeing things a certain way and that way of seeing things became what felt right to me artistically.
I am inspired by beautiful painting and my first inspiration as a visual artist came from the paintings of Chelmonski, Stanislawski, Paniewiz and Zaleski. I was drawn to the richness of the work, the sense of drama and the use of light and dark. The darker color palate sets a deeper, darker mood to their work and I find this appealing. A painter interprets his subject before it is painted, filtering it through his mind and exposing it with skillful use of brush and color palate. I felt I could do the same photographically.
Early on I was also inspired by the work of Jan Bulhak, who was himself also influenced by painting. Like Bulhak, I always felt that photography can be so much more than a way of documenting a visual moment. Photography, like painting, should strive for an ideal and each photographer should use whatever level of craft they have to attain those ideals in his or her work.
Perhaps it was that feeling of having photography strive for an ideal that lead me to also be drawn to the work of Roman Vishniac. Like many Northern Renaissance painters who interpreted the daily lives of the people around them, Vishniac’s photographs captured the essence of the Jewish Shtetl with its Talmudic heritage. In the Shtetl there was a tradition of scholarly conversations between intellectual peers being had in incomplete sentences, hints, and gestures that could replace a whole paragraph of speech; Vishniac captured that ideal with his photographs.
Before arriving in America I did not have access to the high-quality photographic books that you can find so readily here. So I was not aware of what Ansel Adams work, or, for that matter, Edward Weston’s, Brett Weston’s or Morley Baer’s work looked like. What I most remember about the work I had seen in Poland was that it had a general dullness to the prints, and so when I first saw original works by these photographers I was in awe of the richness of tone, the depth of the blacks and the glowing light that seemed to come from the prints. I immediately knew that this is what I wanted to produce technically with my own work.

5. How much Preparation do you put into taking a photograph? Are you planning every step or is it always spontaneous?

I plan where I will go to photograph ahead of time, sometimes months ahead. That includes what time of year I will visit a particular place in order to best capture the lighting and other environmental conditions I am looking for. But once I arrive at a place I must be spontaneous and capture what is before me. I have been blessed on many occasions with weather conditions that allow me to express the drama and strong sense of place many people see in my photographs.
It is not so easy to be a traditional film photographer and to travel on the airlines these days and it has caused me to plan not only when and where I will go, but also how I will develop my film once it is exposed. I now travel with my film in lead encased bags to keep the x-ray machines from fogging it and I have a portable darkroom setup that I use while photographing in Europe.

6. What fascinates you in the places that you shoot?

I look for the sacred essence in my photography subjects. I see the oneness in things that unites, the light carries the information, the message, and I feel the moment intensely with my camera. There is a special moment when I know that I have connected with something bigger than myself and that I have focused and pointed my camera at the essence of my subject. At that moment I feel a fullness that I cannot describe in words because it is a visual experience and I can only refer you to my finished print to explain the fascination of any certain place that I have photographed.