Kyle Hoffmann’s Guide To Telling Stories in Black and White Photography

Kyle Hoffman on where complexity meets simplicity in black and white.

Photography Conversations

Words By

Megan Brownrigg

Photography By

Kyle Hoffmann

Kyle Hoffmann is a man who digs the difficulty of photography. He revels in its chemistry, complexity and mechanics. His iconic black and white images are painstakingly printed using platinum palladium and he uses the same model of camera that was sent to the moon (which, with gravity at play, is pretty heavy). Kyle is meticulous in his stylistic choices, but he’s no purist. Instead he jokes with ease about his nerdiness, and loves photographers who do things differently to him. Kyle just wants everyone to find the joy in getting “obsessed” with something. For him, that happens to be making life hard for himself.

Kyle and I are supposed to be talking about black and white photography. But the conversation quickly becomes a prismatic love letter to his kaleidoscope of fascinations with the art form. Such as how space and time don’t exist in relation to a light particle. For Kyle, black and white is what simplifies it all. Shades of grey ground his images and strip them of context, creating space for his viewers to project their own meaning onto his. We break down his process and how his colourful curiosities become a more muted final image.

Kyle

When I’m thinking about a body of work, there’s normally some kind of underlying theme that I’m trying to convey. For instance my series ‘Fossil’ is all about plants that predate the evolution of bees. I really wanted to communicate this immense sense of time which our human brains are extremely bad at perceiving. We often stay stuck in our every day, but living fossils create less distance than a stone fossil from everything that came before us. And we can pass them in the street.

“I feel like photography is a difficult medium because it has to be real. You can’t isolate yourself in your studio and let thoughts pour out of your head into paintings or pottery.”
— Kyle Hoffmann

Megan

Can you give me an example?

Kyle

Gingko trees. Some of these guys are 290 million years old. Or magnolia trees; they’re about 190 million years old. Did you know they were originally pollinated by beetles? How neat is that? Living fossils have survived everything. Gingko trees survived the Hiroshima blast. Life is so delicate and yet it can be so tenacious.

Stage 2: Making difficult choices - 'film, medium format and black and white'

Kyle

I feel like photography is a difficult medium because it has to be real. You can’t isolate yourself in your studio and let thoughts pour out of your head into paintings or pottery. You have to be more resourceful and find physical objects in the real world that will move people emotionally. There’s a real craft to making that happen. Then there’s the difficulty of actually taking a photo—my mentor Chuck Vallone always called me Manuel because I insisted on shooting manually!

Megan

So you’re a film fan?

Kyle

I love the tangibleness of film, and its alchemy. My negative will outlive me, like a beautiful time capsule. I make platinum palladium prints as well as pigment prints and I love these old processes that rely on chemical reactions to happen. A platinum print—unlike a more conventional silver gelatin print which oxidises—can last over 1000 years. It feels like magic.

“The absence of colour simplifies the image to the base components of why you’re viewing it. It removes contextual cues.”
— Kyle Hoffmann

Megan

What about your camera itself?

Kyle

The camera I use these days is a medium format Hasselblad 500C/M. It’s completely mechanical, modular, and it has no batteries. It’s the first camera that went to the moon. In fact, some of its lenses were left sitting on the moon’s surface because…you know…weight issues for the ride home.

Kyle trots into another room to grab his Hasselblad. When he brings it back, the waist-level viewfinder holds an image of a tree. The branches sit in a stamp of stained glass time.

Stage 3: Printing in monochrome - 'the joy and pain of platinum palladium'

Kyle

There's so many variables with this style of printing, everything can go wrong. Like seriously, you can spend your whole day printing with platinum and then it just falls apart at the end. And people close to you say “maybe you should be doing something else.”

Megan

What’s your advice to people who want to ignore their relatives’ concerns and give it a go anyway?

Kyle

Get yourself a hydrometer and enjoy the trip! Humidity plays a big role in how your final print turns out. If it's too humid, then sometimes it seeps too far in the paper and you can't get the chemicals out. But if it’s too dry, it turns to sepia. You need about 75% to 85% of relative humidity in your space. So when it rains, I get really happy and I throw open all the windows and get my little hydrometer out. The numbers will tell me whether I can print that day or not.

Megan

Ok, so humidity and hydrometers. Anything else to consider?

Kyle

Loads. Be ready to make mistakes, I still make heaps. You’re making a unique handmade object. This kind of printing is called a contact print, so your final image has to be as big as the negative that you make. You’ll be coating the paper with emulsion, letting it dry, rehumidifying the paper, and putting your negative on top of it. Be patient, hope for no dust and imperfections, pray a bit more, and have fun!

Megan

Why do you commit to such a stressful method?

Kyle

I love how the resulting prints are almost impossible to replicate. My prints are my children. I even joked to my grandparents that they grow up and they move out and you just hope they’ll have a good life. My grandmother pointedly reminded me that I can’t control what happens to my kids once they leave…

Kyle digs out the last print that hasn’t yet left his home, unlike the other children he’s sold off. This beautiful lodger depicts Sydney Harbour Bridge. Suspended in fog, the steel pendant drops from the sky. Halfway across the frame, the bridge becomes a spectre, totally disappearing. Kyle had waited five years for the fog to roll over the bridge the right way. He’d run from the ferry to get this shot and, in an excited impulse in the dark room, he forgot to click the development tank. It fell out into the light and almost all of the images on his roll were destroyed. This photo of a bridge swallowed by the sky was the only usable frame. It’s an alloy of Kyle’s patience and his impulse.

Kyle

There was a lot of swearing in development. But I think the obliteration really adds to it. A small miracle.

Kyle points to the image’s border, which has a ridged texture against the bridge’s deep blacks and soft highlights.

Kyle

Do you see how it almost looks like brushstrokes? That's the emulsion you have to mix before you paint it onto the paper. So this is what I think is really cool. But then I showed my grandpa, who’s a watercolour artist, and he was like “Oh, it's great, but I don't really like the borders, you could have made it a little bit straighter.”

Stage Four: Interpretation - 'opening it up with black and white'

Kyle

I work with black and white because I love it. My work is quite minimal and the grain of film creates velvet in my images. And an inviting softness. The absence of colour simplifies the image to the base components of why you’re viewing it. It removes contextual cues.

Megan

You’ve said before you’re interested in how people are hardwired to find reason and meaning…does that include in your work?

Kyle

Yes, I love it when someone else looks at my work and tells me how they experienced it. I like the good and bad. Whatever you want to tell me I want to hear it. Usually it harkens back to personal experience or learned behaviour. That’s how work becomes its own thing and lives and breathes a bit. One lady thought my paper series was cleavage! Everyone’s a pervert on the inside it turns out.

Megan

How do you feel about the use of colour?

Kyle

I find colour to be really difficult. It’s got more elements, so it’s more complex, and you start asking more questions about how this image works. Saying that, one of my few colour works is all about the colour pink. It can be explicit but also calming, and embodies so many things for a single colour. Especially when you’re dealing with conservative men.

Stage Five: Reflection - 'inspiration and advice'

Kyle

In terms of my inspiration, probably above everyone is Imogen Cunningham, whose stunning black and white nature prints set a standard back in 1925. She got me into platinum palladium printing. Just check out her magnolias.

I also love the chaotic work of Brazilian social documentary photographer Sebastião Salgado. For minimalism and silver gelatin prints, it’s got to be Michael Kenna. I love George Byrne's digital manipulations, and the pastel colour minimalism of Franco Fontana. I’m also a huge fan of Jon Setter’s work - he was recently a finalist for the Bowness Prize in Australia.

And lastly, I’m stunned by Hiroshi Sugimoto. He plays with the idea of what photography is. He did these long exposures in cinemas while a film was playing. The result was these eerie ornate images which capture a section of time as much as they do a theatre. I also love the dioramas he photographed at the Natural History Museum in New York. You look at them initially and think they’re these crazy good shots of animals in nature, and then you work out it’s a complete lie. It’s amazing!

Megan

What’s your advice to aspiring photographers?

Kyle

I guess the biggest thing is you just have to be obsessed with it, whatever that you're wanting to do. And it’s ok to be obsessed. And experiment. Once I stacked all my filters together on a roof to catch sunrise. I was so obsessed that I constantly smelled them and prayed they didn’t set on fire! And I got the shot, which went on to do well.

Also, if you’re shooting on film, lean into how it slows you down. And be choosy. Try and get as much as you can out of each negative as possible. I’ll often revisit the same spot multiple times before I shoot.

Finally, thinking about multiple things also stops you from stalling. I have a little journal where I write random stuff that comes into my head. My series ‘Pair’ came about because I saw two leaves in a jar and I thought they looked like they were in love.

So, think about things. But then go out and do them. That’s how I made my third book. It’s ten years of just doing that.

Kyle’s latest book, Monographs, features his exhibited works such as Fossil, Paper, Pink and Poppy, shot with a medium format camera. You can buy it here.