Film and Swedish Nights
Liam Warton is a Swedish analog photographer, born in 1990, and lives and works in Stockholm, Sweden. Liam focuses his camera on things that affect him personally, and his ongoing photo journal is motivated by his inner drive to express himself and bring clarity and understanding to the life around him. The motives and underlying themes are therefore founded in his own experiences and views – when it comes to notions of alternative portrayals of gender, mental illness, anxiety,… or simply an appreciation of the beauty of a certain light. He prefers capturing his subjects and landscapes during the “blue hours”,… or twilight. You will find that a majority of his images will be in this distinctive faded blue, with it’s feeling of melancholy, loneliness and nostalgia. Liam feels inspired by this last hour of light because he feels that there is something intrinsically beautiful in capturing that fleeting moment before it’s forever lost into the night.
Photography is a soothing mechanism for Liam, and he uses it as a way to escape from the mundane. His work is a genre of experimental analogue photography. Shooting film falls the most in line with his personal form of creative expression, which he feels is not as accessible through digital forms of photography. Although the limitations of using an old camera may take longer to process, it’s the absolute Zen of this process that contributes to his feeling that he has actually created something of worth, rather than just pressing a button and documenting what he sees. He finds this sometimes arduous process of creating an image to be quite liberating in unleashing his creative juices. He loves the alchemy of shooting film; seeing an image come to life as one applies different chemicals over the negative. He also appreciates the physicality and tangibility of shooting analog in a digital age. (although he has nothing against digital photography)
In the end, this photo journal is an ongoing personal project, with the images ranging from the urbane Swedish nights of Stockholm, to intimate everyday moments in daily life and travel. It allows the viewer to see things from Liam’s own personal perspective and experiences, unique in the Scandinavian landscape of a Swedish analog photographer
An Experimental Journey
He self describes his style as being “experimental”, mainly because he uses a constantly fluid variety of different techniques to manipulate the images,… from film soaks to randomly painting on his negatives. He also loves to shoot his own personal hoard of expired films, and experiment with multiple exposures. (he’s fascinated by the duality of meaning one can create by simply imposing one image over another). His aim is to create images that are over saturated with emotion and reflective of how he’s feeling at any particular moment.
50MM and 28MM – Says it All
He loves shooting with a variety of analog cameras and he’s constantly in the process of buying and selling equipment. Something fairly common among photographers. And while he does employ some of the analog world’s most popular standbys, (Contax, Canon, etc.), some of his favorite cameras have been the cheapest. Like the Konica T SLR paired with a Hexanon 50mm f/1.7. Other cameras he currently uses are the Contax G1, Contax G2, Fuji GSW690, Canon AE-1, Olympus Pen F & the illustrious deep dive Nikonos. He does favor the 50mm and 28mm focal lengths, and finds that with these two lenses he can pretty much capture everything in his visual vocabulary! His favorite films to date seem to be Kodak Portra 800 and Lomography’s Purple films. But as his path to discovery advances, he still gives credence to his substantial collection of various expired films. Check out his website and Instagram for more. And the Konica T he sometimes uses,….a true analog find.
Website