Max Kellenberger

Member Spotlight - August 2019

Where did you grow up, and where do you live now?

• I was born and raised in a small town in Central Switzerland. After spending the first thirty-five years of my life not far from my birthplace I met a fabulous woman who lived in San Francisco. A year and half after we met I moved to the US, and twenty-six years and two grown children later we’re still happily together in San Francisco.

• Why did you join TPS, and how long have you been involved? It’s been a long time and – frankly – I do not remember exactly how I got involved with TPS. I believe it was on a tip by a photographer friend of mine, around the year 2000. Also, at the time, D. Clarke Evans was the director; I had the pleasure of meeting him once at an opening reception and we had a wonderful connection.
• Why did you become a photographer, and where do you find inspiration or motivation for your work? I first took up photography at a very early age and would develop film in my mother’s closet. I received an East German SLR for my thirteenth birthday, and by 16 I began doing freelance work for my local newspaper. I’ve been committed to photography ever since, and I have been focused on fine-art photography for the last twenty-five years.
  
  I think the main motivation for my work is that I use photography as an instrument for both self-reflection and self-expression. Over the many decades that I have been practicing photography, my largest realization is how to trust my instincts. There are thoughts and images which keep coming back to my mind which want to be expressed, and I’ve learned to listen to those thoughts. I don’t always know the hidden meaning of these ideas until after they’ve been expressed in my work, but the images created from these moments are true to myself and my artistic sensibility.

• How would you describe your photography and/or working process? My photography is often born out of curiosity – curiosity about myself, the world around me, existence as a whole. I’m constantly playing with new ideas and new ways of working in the photographic medium, and usually I’m working on multiple projects in various stages of realization at the same time. But not every idea ends up being successful and you must learn to reject what doesn’t work. Some ideas have taken years of thinking, trying, reimagining to come to their final realization. And some have never made it.
  I always find myself drawn back to the darkroom and handmade processes. There is a level of unpredictability about the darkroom that I love. I am often working with the idea of balance between order and chaos, and a handmade print challenges the idea of perfection. There is always a level of imperfection and unrepeatability, and I try to utilize these inherent “flaws” to compliment the ideas I’m trying to convey in my work.

• Please tell us about your most recent photographic work. It’s somewhat difficult to say what my most recent work is, as I’m often working on a few things at once. I just had a solo show at Corden|Potts Gallery in San Francisco where I exhibited a number of bodies of work that overlapped in their creation, the main similarity between them being that they were all printed in gelatin silver. There were 8x10 contact prints of manufactured still lifes, 20x24 toned photograms, an installation of 12 prints where I’m melting the negative of a self-portrait…I’m always trying something new.