| Dates: | 1965 - | | Born: | UK, London | | Active: | UK |
Edward Dimsdale was born in London, England in 1965. While at Bristol University in the mid 1980s, Dimsdale completed a degree in Social Sciences, but it was during this time that he also developed an interest in photography. Early in his career as a photographer, Dimsdale began experimenting with various development processes, including making prints with paper negatives. This technique traces its roots to the beginning of photography (British photographer William Henry Fox Talbot used paper to create the first negatives; earlier photographic processes had no negative and could only produce a single image).
While honing his darkroom skills assisting fashion photographers in Paris and London, Dimsdale continued to pursue his experiments with paper negatives, and to refine his distinct style. Today, Dimsdale‘s technique begins with standard film negatives. He then uses a series of interim paper positives and negatives to create the final prints. Dimsdale completes his prints by toning them with a mixture of selenium and gold.
The images that Dimsdale creates are at once subtle and complex. They appear as still, beautiful works, yet they are powerfully evocative. Dimsdale begins by capturing a detail or an atmosphere that resonates for him. He follows by whittling away redundancy and paring an image to its barest elements, concentrating the meaning that he found in that image. While presenting a spare, abstracted rendering, a finished photograph virtually glows with the distilled resonance of the original image. Dimsdale believes, however, that the action of distillation only comes full circle through contact with a viewer. “The original resonance is only fully revived when it is inspired back to life by the viewer – by contact with a receptive eye, heart, and mind.”
Since the mid-1990s, Dimsdale has shown his photographs at various art fairs and galleries in the United States and the United Kingdom, including exhibitions at Hackelbury Fine Art in London, where he has been represented since 1998. Dimsdale is also regularly commissioned by both commercial and private clients, and his work is held in collections in the United Kingdom and abroad. Dimsdale is also a lecturer at Cambridge School of Art, where his interests lie in the history of photography and how it relates to contemporary practice. In addition to his pursuit of photography, he also belongs to two experimental theatre groups based in England.
[Courtesy of Gallery 339]Preparing biographies
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