Simon Frey
Simon Frey was born on July 5,
1960 in Lucerne, Switzerland. He finished his education in 1979 and started to work as a freelance photographer, mainly for
newspapers and events, focussing later more on commercial fashion- and people-photography. In 1995, he founded his own company, working in a wider range of new electronic media, including Internet and digital imaging.
Perhaps as an inherited condition, Simon became obsessed by photography in his early childhood. Long before shooting his own pictures, he loved to discover the large image archive of his grandfather, who was an early press photographer in Switzerland.
The portraits shown at the Karolinum are results from one of Simon's independent, non-commercial projects. More pictures will be taken during the next months, and Simon is very happy to make this small contribution to the Mene Tekel festival.
Simon lives in Switzerland and partly in Spain and Hungary. He is married and father of two children.
"The making of …"
The idea for the project was first discussed in mid 2006. Since we wanted to produce pictures in a less artistic but ultra-realistic way, we had to decide from different options and different technologies. We had a clear idea about presentation of our results (it is to mention that the exhibition at the Karolinum is an intermediate result, the final presentation will be different). Black background, pictures in color and a final picture size of 1×1m were our given parameters.
At the time of designing the project, the maximum resolution of 1-shot digital cameras was 22 megapixels. The results with this resolution were very good, but the impressive sharpness and vividness in smaller prints was missing at 1×1m. Using a large format camera (4×5 inch) with classic film was not an option, since it would be too slow and it would not allow our "models" to speak and move during the photo-shooting. Fortunately PhaseOne (http://www.phaseone.com) announced late 2005 the new P45 digital back with an extremely high resolution of 39 megapixels, which was connectable to various medium format cameras. We knew that this resolution would be over the limit of a standard lens, but we knew also that the 120mm Apo-Makro-Planar from Zeiss (for the Contax 645 AF camera) was one of the best lenses ever produced for MF cameras. We have chosen this configuration and it allowed us to work very fast and very independent. But we suffered with the file size — every raw file (it means every single shot!) is converted into a Tiff-file of 250 MB (with 16 bits per channel). All of our computers have bigger disks now!
The choice for a simple and repeatable lighting was an easy one: Briese flash system with a Focus 220 reflector (http://www.briese-lichttechnik.de). The light of this reflector is very unique, soft but focused, therefore resulting in very vivid pictures, without the hardness of a spot or the flatness of a softbox.
Our last challenge was printing. There are only a few inkjet printers which can reproduce this level of quality / resolution and which can print in this size. Our choice was the Epson 9800. We tried different papers, but finally we decided for the Hahnemühle Fine Art Pearl (http://www.hahnemuehle.com). The paper has a very beautiful surface and — most important — is able to reproduce deep black without loosing details in shadows (a common problem in inkjet printing).
Just to note: We were experienced in even larger prints, but only for commercial purpose. Delicate fine art prints of 1×1m were new to us (and to some of our suppliers) and we had to solve some tricky problems like matting, framing and transport. Even the transport case is "custom made"!