Photographer Daniel Hojnacki uses the natural world as his source of inspiration, seeking out visceral and tangible responses to the photographic print.
Daniel Hojnacki is an Albuquerque-based photographer. His practice strives to show the passage of time by creating accumulated acts of capturing the temporal and unseeable. Using the natural world as his source of inspiration and analog photographic techniques, Hojnacki seeks out visceral and tangible responses to the photographic print.
“This series of work investigates ways of recording the fleeting moments of my body and breath to challenge what is able to be ‘stilled’ and captured in a photograph. I use analog processes of photography to make visible that which is ungraspable. These works are records; vessels of timekeeping in which my breath, body, and spit are frozen within. The darkroom is a place of meditative reflection, one where I am in perpetual motion yet in the act of creating moments of quiet stillness.
Using a 19th-century photographic technique called cliché verre, I apply soot to large pieces of glass with a candlewick. The smoke becomes a delicate, volatile negative. I can then ‘draw’ upon it with my body and breath. I relate this material’s process back to the body, how our breath is an invisible residue of ourselves. I use my materials as containers to slow down the invisible passage of my body. I use cameraless techniques to create records of momentary acts of suspension.”
Hojnacki is an MFA candidate at the University of New Mexico where he is currently a photography instructor. Hojnacki has spent many years of his career as a photography educator for youth and nonprofit organizations in his hometown of Chicago. Since moving to New Mexico, Hojnacki has developed experimental online photography courses during the COVID pandemic with the Harwood Art Center.
Albuquerque, NM | danielhojnacki.com
birds + Richard, Albuquerque
