Intentionally Moving

nicholas x bent
Colin Field, Mountain Life Magazine, April 4, 2024

The ghostly, painterly photography of nicholas x bent. Words :: Colin Field.

There’s no denying nicholas x bent’s photography has a haunting quality to it. His images of trees, landscapes and winterscapes are creepy, ethereal and striking; you can’t help but get lost in thought while looking at them. His work is the antithesis of the crystal-clear, full-colour imagery we’re bombarded with daily—and therein lies its beauty. 

Photography isn’t new to x bent; he’s been shooting for 40 years. In a former life he was a caterer for the film industry, where he had permission to take photographs on set. He has incredible behind-the-scenes images of Gord Downie, The Tragically Hip, Sloan, The Tea Party and others. 

He abandoned the rat race back in 2005 and relocated to Walters Falls where he continued to shoot landscapes, finally succumbing to the pull of Instagram about five years ago. What he found there impressed and inspired him.

“I started discovering all these artists,” he says. “Sophie Patry, a French photographer, was one of them. I really loved her punk aesthetic. Her work is very coarse, very grainy and it just spoke to me. I thought, What is she doing?”

Patry is one of a growing number of artists experimenting with what is known as ICM, or intentional camera movement. Using slow shutter speeds while moving the camera, photographers create out-of-focus impressions. 

“It’s a technique that’s been used for a very long time,” says x bent. “Early pioneers would move the camera and discover it created this eerie aspect to an image. It’s really taken off as a technique in the last ten years and people are seeing the joys of creating, if you will, impressionistic images.”

For x bent it was an attempt to recreate something that’s been in his mind’s eye since childhood.

“I was raised in northern Ontario. We would travel everywhere by car and my brother and I would be stuck in the backseat. My mom would be smoking like crazy and we’d be pasted up against the window like, Oh my god get me out of this car! But I’d be staring out of the window at the landscape that would drift by. I’d make my eyes water and then blur them and then I’d start to see different things. I’d look at these trees and these passing landscapes and they were streaked and I thought, Well, that is really cool. And I kept doing that. My family had a place in Killarney and we’d be out on the land and I’d stare at a tree. And the tree, as it’s moving with the wind, would blur. This is what the [ICM] technique afforded me: the ability to create the image that I was seeing in my head, both as a child and as an adult.”

Using shutter speeds anywhere from one to 30 seconds and a variable-density filter to reduce the amount of light penetrating the camera’s lens, x bent has continued to push the experimental aspects of ICM. 

 
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