Retrospective/We are the stories we tell ourselves of who we are /  by Nathan Jones

From 2009-2012, or thereabouts, I carried a Rolleiflex TLR camera with me wherever I went. Almost invariably it was loaded with black-and-white film, which I developed in my bathroom at home. Today I began the process of re-examining the archive of my negatives with the goal of producing a photobook that seeks to make thematic sense of my relationship to photography over the last 15 years. (The four photographs shown above were taken in London, Toronto, and Victoria in late 2009.)

Here is my current selection of photographs for this project.

Here are brief descriptions of my current projects and a list of abandoned/defunct projects.

Denyse Thomasos at the Vancouver Art Gallery /  by Nathan Jones

“Process is an insistence of structure.”
— Denyse Thomasos (1964-2012)

Virtual Incarceration (1999). Acrylic on canvas.

Metropolis (2007). Acrylic, charcoal and porous-point marker on canvas.

Excavations: Courtyards in Surveillance (2007). Acrylic on canvas.

A wonderful afternoon with Sofia at the Vancouver Art Gallery after a delicious dad-and-daughter brunch at Sophie’s Cosmic Café on the first day of spring break. The works of the Trinidadian-Canadian painter Denyse Thomasos provoked strong positive reactions and much animated conversation. (The full-scale images and details of the three paintings shown above were made on my iPhone. These photographs do not do the works justice. They are enormous and must be experienced in person.)

Writing on Photography /  by Nathan Jones

In 2010/2011, I ran a film-photography blog called The Photon Fantastic (now defunct). During this time, I wrote several among the following series of articles as part of a larger, collaborative project called The Beginner's Guide to Film Photography, which unfortunately was never finished. I am collecting them here as a navigational aid for newcomers to this blog, and also as the first step in my own return to the project. I intend to complete the writing by mid-2025 and publish the guide as a book by the end of that year.

I've also written less technical, more philosophical, and much more opinionated articles about photography. They say I'm polarizing. Oh well.

I'm fascinated by the multitude of ways that photographers think and speak about their art. To my mind, photography is a very slippery thing and it takes a lot of thinking to penetrate the surface of what it is. Here's a (growing) collection of thoughts on photography by great practitioners and critics.

If you’re interested in the tools of the trade, I have begun to write detailed experiential and technical reviews of the cameras in my collection, beginning with the Nikon bodies. To date these are:

Mechanical. Rugged. Reliable. My review of the Nikon FM2 now Published /  by Nathan Jones

The Nikon FM2 enjoyed a production run of almost two decades—and for most of that time, it was an anachronism, even by Nikon’s own standards. When the FM2 was released in 1982, the electronically controlled FE, which included aperture-priority auto-exposure—a feature conspicuous for its absence in the FM2—had already been in production for 4 years; only a year later, Nikon unveiled the “technocamera” or FA, which premiered what came to be known as matrix metering and also incorporated shutter-priority auto-exposure for the first time in a Nikon body; and, at the same time, the company added autofocusing to its flagship camera, in the F3AF model. Until the time the FM2 was finally discontinued in 2001, Nikon continued to iterate its professional line of cameras, including introducing the F4 (1988) and the F5 (1996), while only giving the FM2 a modest upgrade (in 1984, to the FM2N, which featured a new, titanium-bladed shutter and an increased X-sync speed from 1/125 s to 1/250 s). Nikon’s high-end line also underwent an evolution during this period, including introduction of the F90 (1992), F90x (1996), and F100 (1999) series of semi-professional cameras, while the FE was upgraded to the comparatively short-lived FE2 (1983-1987). In its consumer offerings, Nikon experimented across a wide range of cameras with plastic components, new form factors, and electronically-controlled, automatic shooting modes tailored to beginning photographers. And all the while, the venerable, rugged, reliable FM2 looked on, essentially unchanged, inheriting none of these improvements. The frothy competition between the major Japanese brands in the 1980s and 90s gave rise to many innovations, some useful and others faddish. This “progress” in camera technology left the FM2 behind—and yet, the camera only appreciated in value and found its way into the bottom of many a professional’s camera bag as a trusty back-up. The FM2 was a loyal friend that could be relied upon to keep shooting when batteries died and temperatures reached –40 ℃.

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