I stumbled on the work of Ron Cowie after my recent experience of using large format cameras at American River on Kangaroo Island when I overexposed some photos of the marshlands, thereby destroying the richness and subtle of the colour.

One day, when I was between two assignments at Connecticut College. I brought my 8×10 camera along and just set it up along a path to make a picture. It was boring until the idea came “You don’t have to photograph it the way it actually looks to make a successful image.”...I was liberated and able to make images that represented how I felt instead of simple documents of what I saw. Here I was with a camera capable of all sorts of swings, tilts and adjustments, every black and white color filter one could have, and I was always trying to make things look “normal”.... didn’t wait for good light because I assumed all light was good light. My job was to work with the light as it was, not how I wanted it to be. The result was a body of work that got things wrong, broke boundaries, and, once again, blurred lines between an interior and exterior world.

Ron Cowie, Where There Is No Boat, I Will Put A Boat, from the Leaving Babylon series

Cowie makes make high-resolution scans of his negatives, interprets the images as he has seen them, and he makes new digital negatives for the sole purpose of platinum printing, which is a contact printing process.