Wendy Stone

I make photographs slowly on film and paper using remarkable cameras and silver-based photographic chemistry, processes and printing. My cameras range from 60 to 130 years old and I use roll film, sheet film, paper and even glass plates to create images.

Summer mornings and evenings are special here in Oxford. When the low sun
 reaches the walls and carved stonework, the buildings glow and their textures are revealed in sharp detail. Familiar landmarks take on new shapes and the angled light shows shadows and details that are missed later in the day.

The city is also busy with students and visitors through the months with reliable sunshine. Setting up my beautiful, old, large-format cameras takes time. I appreciate the quieter early-morning streets while I work through all the steps in making each ‘exposure' - an exposure is a single image on sheet film, a glass plate, or a paper negative.

My cameras capture time. Exposures are up to one minute long and the lens records everything that happens in that time. The shadows captured in these prints have arrived at that particular time, on that same day, every year since my cameras were made, but only once in each year.

These cameras also take me back to a time when images could only be captured with patience, and craft. The early photographers, especially here in Oxford, had skills I can only hope to learn. Their lenses and cameras, and the chemistry they used to conjure their images, were complex and demanding.

On a quiet summer morning Oxford looks very much the same as it did at the end of the 19th century. The images made at that time cannot be repeated, or even entirely equalled, but I enjoy grappling with some of the same challenges faced by those early photographers when they set up their tripods and cameras on Oxford’s streets.