10 Professional Photographers Who Still Shoot Film

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This might be the digital age, but in today’s contemporary art world, there are still flourishing photographers who prefer to shoot film for various reasons. Of course, most of them love the quality of images and the meditative process of the various formats; film as a medium can teach a photographer a lot to inform their work with.
The following 10 artists have been able to produce some exceptional work with film, and each one has a unique style which they formed through their use of this medium:

1.    BOOGIE

Actual name Vladimir Milivojevich, this photographer shoots almost exclusively in black and white film and fixates mostly on unusual and dangerous street scenes of dangerous New York Neighborhoods, gang life and skinheads and violent protests in his home town of Belgrade Serbia. This photojournalistic style is given a dark edge, devoid of distracting colors.
Boogie has been featured in various major magazines including New York Times, Time magazine, Huffington Post, Huck magazine, and an HBO showcalled “How To Make it in America”. He has also published 5 monograph books andtaken part in various gallery exhibitions in Paris, Milan, New York and California. His clients include Nike, Puma and the New York Yankees.

{Nike Cross Campaign 2013 by Boogie}
2.    RICHARD MOSSE

Richard Mosse is another photographer who utilizes the art of film in a creative and meaningful way. The film he chooses to use in most of his works - Kodak AeroChrome - has been discontinued. We have previously interviewed him about his AeroChrome series in Congo which is a beautiful contradiction of a war-riddled countryside depicted in unusually bright magenta hues. The resulting landscapes are beautifully haunting and pleasantly surreal.
What is most interesting and striking about this work is how the use of medium brings out the feelings of unease and unrest that this locality is going through. Instead of showing blatantly violent or depressing scenes, the artist instead puts himself in an uncomfortable situation by choosing a film that is new to him and provides such weird affects,and in turn instills his work with the same kind of aura to awaken these emotions in the audience.
Be sure to check out our exclusive interview with Richard Mosse, and find out what it’s like to trek film through the Congo.

{The Enclave by Richard Mosse}

3.    AMANDA FRIEDMAN

Amanda is well known for her big collection of celebrity portraits, living as she is near Hollywood, but what interests me more is her series of haunting night landscapes that she has shot using medium and large formal film and no digital manipulation or affects. She says she loves using film for these low light long exposures as she simply can’t get the same kind of quality and exposure latitudes with digital. She can get better blacks and great quality even at ISO 800, and so we can see in her many long exposures. The lights and darks are just perfectly captures, and the whole scene has the feel of a UFO invasion in the process. There is always a strong light source in her photos that gives her night landscapes a staged yet haunting feel that is just simply beautiful.

{Public Offender by Amanda Friedman}

4.     SIMON WATSON

Watson is an Irish photographer who mainly works with portraiture, interiors, and travel photography. A lot of his work is commercial and he has published in various magazines. However, his series which encapsulates the interiors of houses in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina and interiors of the Auschwitz concentration camp shows his fine art side and is quite powerful.
He reflects on how he questions whether he is invading the privacy of the victims, and notices how their presence in these spaces is still felt. He says he loves to shoot his work in film because it is so simple and easy to use, and so much more beautiful and sophisticated than digital.

{Elie Saab Vanity Fair Spain by Simon Watson}

5.     JEFF LIPSKY

Jeff Lipsky is a commercial photographer working and living in Santa Monica. His clients include various huge magazines such as Vogue and Outside magazine and he has countless celebrity portraits in his collection. Jeff finds film to be beautiful and states many reasons for choosing to shoot with it. His favorite is 4x5” format for portraits and he feels digital takes away a lot of the pace and feel of sheet film. Film is more forgiving and he feels you can capture more detail in most lighting situations, details which digital cannot yet match.

{Roxy Campaign by Jeff Lipsky}

6.     TODD HIDO

Todd Hido is most well-known for his haunting series of various houses in the night. These photographs are eerily devoid of any human presence, and yet the bright lights within the houses have a feeling of spying or encroaching on someone’s property. Hido likes to drive around, house hunt, and react to different lights, at times preferring to shoot directly into the sun or street lights. This gloomy night time scenes have a very dark painterly feel to them.
He says he shoots like a documentarian with the natural light available, but in the darkroom he is more like painter, slowly taking his photos to where they end up. Hido has been part of various exhibitions both solo and group, and has been featured in countless museum collections including the Guggenheim in New York.

{House Hunting by Todd Hido}

7.     RYAN McGinley

Ryan McGinley is well known for depicting youth in all its naked innocence. His various nude series are powerful and beautiful images, all shot on film except for his latest black and white series “Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere”. I find his most striking work is “Moonmilk”, also known as the Caves, since it is shot in underground caves where his nudes sort of become part of the landscape. These are long exposure so the models have to hold their poses for quite a while, and McGinley admits that he has never worked this hard on any other project. McGinley has the honor of being the youngest artist to get a solo show at the Whitney Museum of American Art, and has also had solo shows at MoMA P.S. 1, New York.

{Somewhere Place by Ryan McGinley}

8.     ROB HORNSTRA

Rob Hornstra is a Dutch photographer who mainly produces documentary style portraiture in former Soviet Union. He works mainly with medium and large format film, which he takes out to where ever he is shootings. Interestingly enough, he feels the bulky and slow medium of these formats lets him take more spontaneous pictures. Even though people are painfully aware of his presence, the amount of time it takes means that people eventually relax and no longer hold a pose. He likes the fact that he can turn any setting into his studio and how people cannot avoid his presence.

{Communism & Cowgirls (2004) by Rob Hornstra}

9.     NADAV KANDER

{Chongqing XI, Chongqing Municipality, 2007 by Nadav Kander}
Nadav Kander is a photographer who likes to make landscape photographs in large format which seek to capture “the aesthetics of destruction”. One of his most well-known series called “Dust” centers around the former nuclear test sites on the border between Kazakhstan and Russia, which depicts the strange beauty that lies in these ruined and abandoned sites. The large format helps capture the empty stillness of the eerie scenes perfectly. Kander is also known for his portraits of the Barrack Obama Administration, which was the largest series to be published in the Times magazine by one single photographer.

10.    JONI STERNBACH

Joni Sternbach technically works with a historic technique called the wet-plate collodian process which is used to create photographs on metal sheets known as tintypes. The process is slow and extremely manual where she covers each plate with emulsion by hand on location before loading it onto a large format camera – quite interesting! The result is atmospheric and mysterious shots of her subject matter which is an on-going series of surfers, the ocean and the beach. The photographs have a unique old-fashioned quality unlike anything else I’ve seen.

{SurfLand 14.09.04 #3 Alexa by Joni Sternbach}

These 10 photographers are great examples of professionals who still shoot film, but of course they are by no means the only ones. Most photographers who have been doing professional or fine art photography for some time prefer to stick to film because of the patience required, as well as the quality of the prints produced. Another added bonus of film is the ability to make absolutely enormous prints when shooting medium and large format. There is something beautiful about film, and a certain lushness in the grain, tones and color that digital just cannot provide.

Courtesy of: I Still Shoot Film