An Interview with Eva Bowan on Analogue Magic

As of now, Eva Bowan's been living the dream of any artist. Having worked for big clients such as Sony and Vice, Eva's reputation as an audio-visual artist keeps soaring higher and higher. Having prolific experience with digital mediums such as graphic design, music, video, and photography, she reimagines the ordinary by combining them with analogue techniques.

Hence her work, particularly her photography had a unique and undeniably charming character. It is through analogue techniques that she explores themes of escapism, the dream zone, and spirituality in nature. Read our inspiring interview with Eva as she talks about her love for analogue photography and its magic.

Hi Eva, welcome to Lomography Magazine! Firstly, tell us more about your film photography. How did it start? What made you stick to film?

Hello, thanks for having me! I was raised in the 90s in Poland so naturally, I was using film back then, I got my first film camera when I was probably about 10 and took pictures of everything around. I eventually moved on to digital but came back to film a few years ago (although I still use digital occasionally). I personally love the grain, the colors and the overall warmth of film, as well as the more physical way of preserving memories in the world where everything is stored as digital data. Another reason is that being a multidisciplinary artist I like to combine digital and analogue media, so I like to take analogue photos and then process them digitally sometimes.

Most of your images are bursting with crazy colors!. What does color mean for you? May we know how this aesthetic helps your express yourself?

I'm a highly emotional person and I can get overwhelmed at times, therefore I like my photos to reflect my emotional state more than the reality itself. Manipulating the colors helps me to influence the atmosphere and the emotional response of the viewer. I want to share a feeling, a vision, what I perceive through the prism of what I am going through internally, not necessarily what I see with my eyes.

Do you have a favorite film technique?

I do love light leaks which you can see in the majority of my photos, there's just something so ephemeral and magical about those colorful artifacts but I also love using prisms (like lighting gels, pieces of glass and crystals). Plus I like the look of various film soups, although I don't use them much myself (I'm too impatient to wait for the film to dry that long).

You shoot mostly outdoors, especially the sky. May we know why?

The reason I shoot mostly outdoors is that I love natural lighting and I find nature inspiring and calming. Although the main reason I've been shooting a lot of the sky recently is because for the last 2 years I've lived in the countryside (as opposed to being raised and living nearly my whole life in a big city), which I enjoyed but I also felt very isolated and sometimes the only consolation I had was the sky and the clouds.

If you could spend some time with any photographer or artist, dead, alive or fictional, who would it be?

It's pretty hard to choose but it would have to be Wassily Kandinsky I think. I'm dying to know how he managed to achieve such incredible balance and harmony with such a multitude of colors.

What's an ordinary day look like for Eva Bowan?

My days are pretty varied to be fair - I split my time between working on freelance projects for different clients, teaching, making music, writing children's books and walking my dog. I just moved back to the city though, which means a lot more hanging out with friends, wine-drinking, and checking out strange audio-visual events.

Any on-going project, or other plans you're keen to work on?

Currently, I'm at the point in my life where I'm looking for new directions to expand to, so I am trying to find interesting people to collaborate with (since I tend to work on my own a lot) and new projects to work on. I'm also writing a new EP and I am keen on working on a lot more audio-visual projects in the future.

More of Eva's analogue magic can be found in her Instagram and website.

written by cielsan on 2018-10-05 #people #film-photography #eva-bowan