Originally appeared on the Benham Gallery website in Seattle on January 23, 2002
Kempe & his Leica: Playing outside the rules
“I am not motivated by a desire to show my work to others, but to express what it is that I see. The darkroom is where my process is most alive for me, and if I hadn’t fallen into showing my work at the Benham, I would probably have little more to show for myself than a stack of prints at my house, covered in dust.”
– Denis Kempe
By his own admission, Denis Kempe doesn’t like to play by the rules. A seasoned art photographer for the past fifteen years, Kempe doesn’t like to shoot and present his images in “themes” that would neatly circumscribe his work for the viewer, preferring instead to carry his camera along with him and shoot as the mood strikes, allowing his experienced eye and his Leica camera to gather the images he presents.
Kempe’s love affair with Leica equipment began very early in his photographic career, soon after he got back his first roll of film, in fact.
“A friend had loaned me a camera, and though I had never used one before, I knew that as soon as I had the viewfinder against my eye that photography was going to be with me for a long time,” said Kempe.
The results of this early foray, however, were less than spectacular.
“I got back the pictures from the developers and I thought, ‘god, this is just terrible.’ I mean, really terrible.”
Prior to his career as a photographer, Kempe spent 20 years working as a precision machinist in a tool production facility. From this perspective, Kempe could quickly grasp that much of what makes a great finished image lay in the technical aspect of film development and printing. So he went out and bought himself a complete used darkroom – and it just so happened that one of the main components was a Leica enlarger.
“What technical processes have in common is a need for constant creative problem-solving, with an eye towards the aesthetics of solving the problem,” said Kemp. “In the darkroom, there are any number of decisions to be made based on what to do with the negative to make a good picture.”
Soon, Kempe bought his first camera, and began shooting and making prints, teaching himself as he went along. But his other career in tool-making led him to believe that the camera he had wasn’t the precision tool that he was really looking for.
“I was in a camera shop complaining about my camera,” said Kempe. “I still didn’t really know how to take pictures, but I knew that my camera was a piece of junk. The guy behind the counter listened to me for awhile, and then he finally reached into his own bag, pulled out his own Leica and said, ‘This is the camera you really want.’ And he was right. Because as soon as I saw it, I knew that it was a high-quality tool made expressly for the process of capturing images in the moment, and I knew I had to have one.”
When it was first introduced in 1924, the Leica 35mm was a breakthrough in photographic technology in that it offered the photographer such now common conveniences as multiple exposure within the camera, a new portability that allowed the camera to be carried easily in a pocket and taken into crowds with ease, as well as the striking innovation that a camera could be held to the face as an extension of the photographer’s eye. But though all of these features are now built into any portable camera, it is the Leica’s all-metal construction, durability, and precision design that keeps photographers like Kempe committed to the Leica.
“There’s a rule in tooling that I learned from my mentor, which is very simple. Tooling must look like tooling, and it must have an aesthetic quality and a structural integrity that will encourage the person using it to do an excellent job with it. Without a doubt, it was my career as a tool machinist that allowed me to recognize on sight alone what the Leica had to offer, in terms of structural integrity and as a precision tool designed for gathering images that the eye finds intriguing.”
And while the images that Kempe’s eye finds to capture and print may not adhere to the guidelines of an a priori constriction of a stated theme, even a cursory glance through his past and recent work reveals an eye intrigued with two strongly opposed thematics: the juxtapositions of man-made geometrical forms in compositions framed by his lens, and the immediate, temporal essence of life, revealed through captured moments of ordinary people in passing. In his more ambitious works, Kempe realizes a fusion of both obsessions, revealing to the viewer the reality of ourselves as shadow and motion, and our artifacts as forms frozen outside of the time which marks our movement amidst them.
“Time is essential to understanding what is captured on a negative,” said Kempe. “After all, the camera just captures what will need to be printed, and the process of making pictures comes in the processing and the printing. The negative is the paint, and the enlarger is the brush – but it’s really in the darkroom where the art is revealed.”
You can view Denis Kempe’s latest work at the Leica Presents show, beginning on March 25 at the Benham Gallery.
