Zia Ayub

CV

I started my journey as a fine art photographer in 1991. During the years of my studies, I fell in love with Pictorial Photography with its beautiful and impressionistic method renders a soft-focus and warm painterly style. Even to this day with many decades that have passed, I still never get tired of looking at the works by Julia Margaret Cameron, Alvin Langdon Coburn, Robert Demachy and Edward Steichen. And, yet my standard practice of using toy film cameras with its characteristic soft-focus and printing silver gelatin became limited to me. Although I have formal training in alternative processes, when I was studying in school the technique was exciting, the final results fell short of my expectations. Yet, I did not want to abandon the analog darkroom.

After many years of research and trial-and-error, in 2003, I discovered a new process by altering the chemistry of the silver gelatin print. I was now making unique one-of-a-kind prints. Still, I was not totally satisfied; continuing in my research, I experimented with a combination of digital and analog to create images resembling Pictorialism. The process is done without any usage of the 19th-century photographic processes—in simple terms, the process is a combination of analog and digital.