Nathan Baker
Columbia College Chicago
Scooter Repair Shop — Chicago
Biography: Nathan Baker began his college career at Kendall College of Art & Design as a graphic design major. A growing interest in photography — spearheaded by making live band photographs — caused him to change to a major of photography in his sophomore year. Seeking to expand his photographic knowledge, he then decided to move to Chicago and attend Columbia College. He has won multiple awards for his photographs, including an Albert P. Weismann scholarship, the Kodak Professional Scholarship, and first place in the Union League of Chicago’s annual juried art competition. His future plans include opening a small, high-end custom digital print lab and continuing to make artwork.
Objective: This piece is one in a series about contemporary labor that I am currently working on. I come from a background of blue-collar labor; my father owns a very small siding installation and window replacement business, and I chose not to follow in his footsteps. Through attending college and expanding my knowledge of, first, photography, and then digital means of working with photography, my life goals and perspectives have changed dramatically. Now that I am exposed to this entirely new realm, I have looked back on things previously familiar to me and compared them with my current perspectives. Since labor and money were a constant topic of conversation in my household growing up, it began to make sense to me why I was interested in the nature of labor and how this has changed in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. In these photographs, I create environments that display work being performed. Since the laborers depicted are multiples of one figure, this insinuates the notion of the cloned laborer. However, my main focus in this work is to examine the way we work by depicting in one photograph many tasks that make up a specific occupation. My work is an expansion of the work of 20th-century photographers, such as Frank Gilbreth, who were employed by large corporations to make time-motion studies of factory workers in order to increase production efficiency. Their multiple-exposure images depicted worker patterns when interacting with machines, which helped in the design of production facilities and other aspects of the twentieth-century factory. My work has a similar purpose: to make a photograph that depicts the worker during a period of labor, providing an image that we can use to study and contemplate the nature of contemporary labor, and the human worker's place within that construct.
Tools used: Adobe® Photoshop® is utterly essential to the construction of my photographs. To begin with, I use a 4-inch-by-5-inch view camera to make anywhere from 10 to 40 photographs of an individual at work. I then take the processed film and, using an Imacon scanner, scan the transparencies into 250MB files. Bringing these into Photoshop, I make a basic construction of my image by carefully selecting the figure from each piece of film and compositing them all into one image. This can take anywhere from 5 to 20 hours, depending on the number of figures. I then make more accurate curves adjustments and make final retouches to the composited image to give me my first-generation proof. Then, elements from different pieces of film (such as a chair, notebook, tool, piece of machinery) are composited into the image to tighten the feel and composition of the image. Finally, based on test prints, the curves are adjusted to achieve perfect color, contrast, and saturation. The final product is a 40-inch-by-50-inch color inkjet print made on an Epson 9600 printer.
