Zeno Gill's "She Patiently Radiates Around You"

ALTER/ANALOG is so happy to feature our good friend and supporter Zeno Gill. Zeno's work has been published worldwide, both digitally and in print. Zeno calls Westchester home and finds inspiration in NYC.

Photographer: Zeno Gill — https://zenogillphotography.com; https://instagram.com/zenopox

Model: Taye Rose — https://instagram.com/babytaybae

A/A: What inspired this latest series of work?

ZG: I've admired Taye's work for a while, so I scheduled a collaboration when she visited NYC recently. I had an idea for a way to potentially manipulate film negatives that I had yet to try, and had been wanting to experiment with portraiture, so this seemed like a great opportunity to try the new technique on portraiture negatives. Since it was chilly out when we shot, we had to shoot indoors, but I wanted to get some NYC flavor into the images, so I exposed the frames once while walking through Midtown Manhattan on the way to the studio.

A/A: How did you create the effects in this series?

ZG: With these I tried a technique that I thought of recently: spraying dye and bleach onto the negatives before scanning them. I tried a few tests on old negatives to get a sense of what to expect, then gave it a shot!

A/A: What are your suggestions for portraiture when souping film? I always struggle with that.

ZG: I don't know that I can offer any useful suggestions for portraiture when souping or otherwise destroying film, as I tend to improvise anyway. For these portraits, I didn't consider at all how to accommodate the forthcoming alteration on the negatives; I mostly considered their being second exposures, so I kept them simple and tried to keep some darkness in them, but not knowing what each corresponding first exposure was, I didn't plan each composition.