The Practice
Jens Mauthe’s photographic practice is amateur in the original sense of the word — work pursued for its own sake rather than for commercial output. The scope of the practice is narrow and deep. Analog film. Mechanical cameras. Home darkroom. Long-term projects rather than one-off images.
Format and Capture
35mm and medium format film, exclusively. Black and white only. Mechanical cameras with manual exposure control. No digital capture, no hybrid workflows, no lab outsourcing. Every roll is shot, developed, contact-printed, and edited in-house.
Darkroom Work
Film development takes place in a personal darkroom using traditional chemistry — D-76, HC-110, and Rodinal depending on the film stock and intended outcome. Printing is done on fiber-based paper with archival chemistry. Each print is dodged, burned, and adjusted by hand. Test strips are made and recorded. The process from negative to final print can take days for a single image.
Project Structure
Work is organized around projects rather than individual photographs. Each project has a defined subject area, a working method, and a documented progression. Recent projects have focused on industrial remnants, transitional interiors, and the play of indirect light across worn surfaces. Projects run for months or years before they’re considered complete.
Documentation
Every photograph in the practice is accompanied by exposure notes, development data, and printing records. This documentation is part of the work itself. It allows results to be replicated, refined, and improved over time. It also creates a record of the technical decisions that produced a given image — information that is otherwise lost in digital workflows.
Output
The output of the practice is physical — finished prints on fiber paper, archived and stored as photographic objects. A selection of images is also published online through Jens’s profiles on Flickr, Behance, and Medium, where the work can be viewed in digital form.