Grace Hazel resides on top of a mountain in the middle of the South Pacific Ocean. She sleeps in a yurt with a red door and lives with her best friends on a vegetable and flower farm, where the night is black, stars scream at you, and the frogs and birds are the daily chorus. She spends her days gardening, swimming at the sea, tending to children, and creating art, usually in form of analog photography. She creates both black and white and color images, sometimes experimenting with her film by soaking it, usually in her shi shi. She processes the color film in her outdoor kitchen in her kitchen sink. She does not like to photoshop her images nor do much editing. She'd rather be hanging her laundry in the sunshine or listening to her best friends sing.
The worlds within the imagery provoke dreamlike states and one can get lost in the realms that are invented. She mostly uses herself as a model out of convenience but also because it feeds her need to allow the camera to do it's magic. She believes that once the moment captured is left to the dance of chance, the image becomes more authentic, a candid capture without pose.
Grace has a BA in Art from the University of California Santa Cruz, where she studied both photography and printmaking. She enjoys making anything that is tangible and requires process, such as cyanotypes, van dykes, albumens, lumens, solar prints, and shell hunting.
You might find her running in the rain at the beach, stomping in puddles, or floating through the forest with a wild look in her eye, a heavy tripod in hand, and her camera around her neck.
See more film photography from Grace Hazel on Tumblr, Instagram, and on her website.
