WHO I AM
David Shedlarz
Practicing this work for nearly a decade has changed the way I see. I have learned that traditions survive because everyday people quietly choose to carry them forward, that every tradition is only one generation from becoming a memory, and that the smallest gestures are often the ones that stay with us. Most of all, I have learned to look beyond the cultural archetype and see the individual. The places are different. The traditions are different. The circumstances are different. The humanity is not.
Over time, the work has become less about seeking the extraordinary and more about recognizing what may not remain. Photography doesn’t preserve permanence. It preserves one moment inside an ongoing story of change. I travel to places where the past is still present, and the future has already begun to arrive. Not because change should be resisted, but because what exists in the space between the two deserves to be witnessed.
That same responsibility extends beyond making the photograph. If an image is intended to carry something forward, the object itself should be made to endure. Sometimes the photographer doesn’t know they are making a historical record until the place they stood no longer exists.
My work is intended to endure, and that is why I am drawn to historic printing processes. The dye transfer technique, which I employ in works such as "Mirror" and “Where Time Rests”, embodies this balance. Its precision, richness, and rarity imbue the print with a tactile and luminous quality rarely achievable in contemporary practice. Similarly, my use of the platinum palladium printing process draws on one of photography's most revered historic methods, prized for its tonal depth, permanence, and subtle beauty. Images such as "Set Before Us" and "Lost in Thought" are powerful examples of this timeless technique.
Ultimately, I imagine someone standing in front of one of my images, many years from now, looking into a world that once existed but is now hard to imagine. One generation informing the next.