Daren You:
Daren You is a Chinese photographer currently living in the San Francisco Bay Area. His work has been published in Lens Culture Magazine, i-D, Der Greif Magazine, Phases Magazine and the official blog of San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
His work focuses on chaos photography and unique processes to achieve his desired images with a sense of randomness linked to chaos photography itself.
Chaos Theory:
Chaos Photography:
One definition of chaos is when nonlinear things are impossible to predict and control. If law and order rule the universe, chaos, is the totally disorganized opposite of this.
Daren You has been exploring how to let images create themselves and avoid manipulation by photographers and cameras. For this series, he used several techniques (both historical and contemporary) to process the same image: reticulated film through a high temperature developing process, liquid emulsion, inkjet printing, darkroom printing and en-caustic painting. He then merged all these processes together by re shooting the images.
Daren You was curious about what the image will become after so many processes. The result is random, no one knows what it will look like. It is impossible to control the result by layering these processes on top of the same image, together. The dark tone in his images references the universe. It’s infinite and empty nature. When You chose his subject matter, he was looking for subjects with unpredictable elements: they’re unstable and disordered, like wind, clouds and water. Many systems that we live wit such as landscapes and trees, exhibit complex and chaotic behaviors. They are constantly in flux.
“How does photographing on film (or using your material photographic process of predilection) inform your artistic practice?“
“Gelatin silver print is still the best way in the world to present black and white photographs; it has the tones and the texture that you can’t get from the digital print. That’s the main reason why I use black and white film. I also enjoy the random visual effects that created during the time of processing. Sometimes your room is not clean enough; you can see the ash marks on your negatives, which reminds me that I exist in a physical world rather than a cold digital world. Sometimes you didn’t adjust your processing temperature very well; you will see the reticulated grains and uneven gray tones in your photographs, they all created different kinds of beauty.”
