The Awards Collective was created to feature the works of artists who have received either a Juror’s Award or Director’s Award in ASG’s Online exhibitions.  Jim Rohan’s image Suspension Tower, Brooklyn Bridge received the Director’s Award in the imperfect lens exhibition juried by Amanda Smith.  Jim’s exhibition Film is Dead is discussed in this GalleryTalk.

Artist Statement

“Film is Dead is a long term project made during the last ten or so years using plastic cameras and film that reached its expiration date roughly forty to sixty years ago. This series of photos includes both images from the natural world and the constructed environment.

For many years, I was satisfied with making “straight” plastic camera with fresh film. Much of my recent work, however, has been about the deconstruction of my images and using extremely expired film allowed another avenue for me to appease my destructive image making tendencies even further.

During the past few years, the sixty year old film and the sixty plus year old me became friends. There’s something strangely comforting in using film that’s as old as oneself. I used films with names like “Lucky”, “Thrifty”, “Rex” and my personal favorite called “DandiPan”. These films were often excessively curly, brittle, or sometimes even strangely damp or sticky. Every now and then, I’d find some strange algae-like life forms growing on the emulsion. Magical numbers from the film’s paper backing often appeared out of nowhere. Now and then I’d be blessed with the occasional “black sun”, which was really not a sun but just a large imperfection placed in a fortuitous location in the film frame. All of the films used for these images have long ceased production. The “freshest” film that I used was Kodak Verichrome Pan that expired in 1986. Verichrome itself ceased to be manufactured nearly twenty five years ago.

It’s also a challenge using this ancient material masquerading as film. What I am not presenting here are the many blank rolls that I unintentionally shot because the film had reached its ultimate demise. Sometimes the rolls were clear. At other times, the rolls had so much base fog that they were almost completely black and no amount of chemical voodoo or secret developing incantation could rescue them. Of course, I am convinced that my best images remain lost forever on those particular rolls of film.

Film is dead. Long live film.”

Jim Rohan
March, 2026

Bio

I am a late arrival to my own photography. I spent thirty-five years in the commercial photographic industry as a studio photographer and photo lab co-owner. To this end, my time was devoted to making images for others. Now retired, I have rediscovered my own photography through the use of plastic cameras. These dubious cameras are the antithesis of everything that I did in the commercial photographic world for thirty plus years. I think of using plastic cameras as sort of a therapy, a cure for the sharp, detailed images that dominated my professional past. My current photos avoid technical sharpness and precision and celebrate the soft focus, light leaks, vignetting and the overall imperfections that plastic lenses produce. I feel that these qualities give my images a soft, atmospheric and evocative quality that feel-more like half-remembered memories or dreams than clinical documentary photos.

I grew up and currently live much of the year in the Boston area. My wife and I spend summers wondering up and down the beaches of Prince Edward Island, Canada. I received a BA from Boston College in Communications and Political Science. I did my graduate work at Penn State University in Journalism. Many years later, I discovered that this sort of education has very little to do with making photos with a plastic camera.

website:  jamesrohan.com

instagram: @jimrohan

link to online exhibition