Ross Faircloth

Ross Faircloth is a Fine Art Photographer living and working in the Dallas / Fort Worth area. He graduated in 2012 from Texas Woman's University with an MFA in Photography and in 2009 from the University of Texas at Arlington with a BFA in Photography. Ross grew up in Kaufman, TX, a small rural town about 35 miles east of Dallas. He considers this beautiful, wide open and inviting landscape as a major influence in his overall aesthetic and growth as an artist. He works with both traditional and experimental darkroom techniques, and new forms of digital media. His work focuses on using conventional photographic elements and processes in new and experimental ways. One through pure experimentation in the darkroom working with only light, photo paper, and photo-chemistry, the other through digitally capturing an image from a video game and then printing that image traditionally through the darkroom.

Artist Statement 

Dark Grandeur

Today, photography is primarily viewed as a mechanical and technologically driven medium. This limited view of photography can be a disservice to the medium. Photography is much more than a camera and lens attached to a recording medium. The digital revolution helped to remove the importance of printing from photography. These two elements were very close relatives before then. With digital taking over the camera and photography, I felt the need to react and look at what was being left behind: the darkroom. After all, a photograph does not truly exist without a print. It may exist simply as 1’s and 0’s, bits of information but it is not a photograph in that state. Even a latent print in the darkroom is still a print, albeit without an image. It has yet to be fully realized but it has weight, both in the physical world and in the potential for what is unseen but surely there.

The chemistry, paper, enlargers, running water, and amber glow; all these things have a tangible and powerful experience over the artist in space and time. The materials and places needed a voice, to be displayed without or with minimal reference to a technically pure photograph. This series focuses on the darkroom and printing aspect of photography as a means for pure expression, as the camera and act of photographing takes backstage, or a supporting role. This is accomplished by tearing down the physical surface of the print and thus creating a new and equal focal point with the artists’ hand visible along with a printed image. The selection of camera produced images are not meant to be cohesive from piece to piece, but instead the images contain elements such as human figures, natural landscapes, and a deck of cards. These diverse elements relate to the human experience, and in particular that of the artist, for whom nature, and it’s routine, has a calming effect and chance is equal to the sublime, both terrifying and beautiful at the same time.