In 1995 photographer Mark DeBernardi became the manager of the custom printing house Lab One, on West Adams, and his annoyance with some of his clients helped him find his own style. “I was the front person for dealing with people who were unhappy with their prints,” he says. “We had photographers who had never printed and were looking for better prints than could be produced from their negatives. They would give me out-of-focus negatives and say, ‘Can’t you make them sharper?’ It made me want to do the opposite of what I was doing for everybody else.” He started stepping on his own images, using the wrong developer, adding stains and creases. “It really was a release for me after these eight-hour days of making perfect prints,” he says.
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He’s still altering his negatives and prints. His 30 photos of Illinois landscapes at Flatfile have dots of black acrylic paint that were inspired by defects in old prints, and he’s added charcoal to the blacks and grays to make them look richer and wetter. And he’s sanded the surface of the prints to make them more tactile.
DeBernardi, who’s long been photographing with cheap plastic cameras, got interested in them in the first photo class he took at Ohio University, where he was required to use one. “I loved the look,” he says. “If anything was really in focus it would be the center, and the edges would fall off. I later used them for travel pictures, photographing a lot of landscapes with rusted machinery and crumbling statues, beaches with shredded palm trees. I was drawn to broken nature, places we’ve ruined.”
Where: Flatfile, 217 N. Carpenter
