Sebastian Edge may not be the first who attempts to reinvent photography: by going back to black and white and the prelude of photographic subjects - landscapes and portraits - by building his own camera and his own dark room and thus voluntarily bowing to the constraints of this primitive art, slow, weighty, weaving splendours, and failures. If he does though it isn't out of some misplaced nostalgia or easy retro effect, but it is to rethink the relationship between image and time.
Pierre Zaoui
Sebastian Edge was born in 1981 into a resourceful and creative family. After moving to rural Kent, he spent his childhood helping his father hand-build the family house from the fallen oak trees of the hurricane of 1987. At age 15 he discovers photographic philosophy and builds the first of many cameras age 16. In 2006, using the same wood his father had reclaimed after the great storm, he builds a camera large enough to expose wet collodion glass negatives plates that measure 18x22 inches. The Hurricane camera was born.
Edge studied for a Photography Arts degree at KIAD Maidstone, won a Scholarship for a Master's in film and photography at the University for the Creative Arts, lectured at London Westminster College and now supports students at London Metropolitan University in Whitechapel. He is the Founder of the North London Darkroom collective 2011, establishing a film and darkroom facility in London for English and European artists on the move, and has produced prints for museums all over the world.