DIRECT HEADS

2020-Present

Direct Heads is part of Quayle’s PhD Research Project. The images you see below are the beginning of a series of experimentations where Quayle creates Ultra Large Format Images made in the back of a 24x24 inch prototype camera. Unlike typical analogue photographic image making processes, the technique Quayle uses to make these life-size images does not require the image to be reversed (inverted from negative to positive), the positive image is made directly in the back of the camera.

Direct Heads currently exists as a series of portraits, each model sits for Quayle and their life-size likeness is burnt into a light sensitive media, each photon that is bouncing off, or being emitted from his subject is trapped within this media, making each photograph a unique artefact.

It is not Quayle’s intention to merely record a likeness of his subjects, he is striving to capture something else. Something that Victorian poet, Elizabeth Barrett Browning referred to as a “Sense of Nearness”, a phenomenon that puts the viewer of the photographic artefact in proximity of the real-life recorded event.