Recently, we sat down with Fergus Carmichael Winterbon, a photographic artist whose practice centres on the historic cyanotype process. In a photographic culture driven by speed and instant results, Fergus has chosen a life organised around slowness and resistance to the pace of modern image-making. Through patience and an appreciation for analogue processes, his work reminds us that some photographs are not simply captured but are carefully cultivated over time.
What experience first made you realise you were an artist?
It might have been my first experience of watching Magenta Devine on TV as a child in the ’90s. I often think back to seeing a French band performing in a see-through cement mixer and
feeling my mind completely open up.
But let me bring it back to photography. In my late teens, I started photographing anything and everything. I started out on film, back when you could buy it cheaply and get it developed almost anywhere. There was something about seeing a photograph in print capturing the feeling or emotion of a scene, landscape, or person that totally captivated me. I don’t think I’ve stopped taking photographs since I was 16 or 17.
When it comes to photography and artists, I think the first exhibition that really affected me was Diane Arbus. It was possibly the first time I cried in a gallery. The first photobook I bought was Truth Study Center… probably because there was cock in it, but Tillmans shaped how I looked and made photographs in my life for a good decade.
All of these moments link back to me discovering myself as an artist. I’ve known for a long time that this is what I wanted to do, but over the last four years there has been a real shift in both my mindset and my practice.
Alongside his photographic practice, Fergus works as the General Manager of an independent group of coffee shops in London’s Fleet Street. Balancing a full-time career with artistic work has shaped the rhythm of his creative process, encouraging him to embrace photography as something that unfolds over days rather than hours. A single cyanotype can involve preparing materials one day, exposing and washing the print the next, before allowing it to dry and deciding whether to tone it, often using coffee, which subtly transforms the characteristic Prussian blue into warmer, more organic hues. Fergus continues to push the process further, experimenting with large-scale cyanotypes while remaining committed to the slow, tactile qualities that first drew him to this remarkable nineteenth-century technique.
What do you struggle with the most in your creative work, and how do you confront it?
Time. Money. Self-doubt. Wondering if the work is good enough. Technical challenges. Having enough space to make large-scale pieces. The way I deal with it is pretty simple; I just keep going. I keep making, keep shooting, keep learning, and keep developing my processes. There is always something new to learn, and on both the good days and the bad days, I have to keep creating. The larger-scale works are coming over the next two or three months once I’ve reprocessed all of my acetate negatives.
Which ideas, people, or works have most influenced the way you think?
The list is endless. Four or five years ago, I would probably have said Wolfgang Tillmans and Diane Arbus. Now it’s artists like Ana Mendieta, Laura Aguilar, and Mark McKnight, alongside ideas around queer ecology. More than ever, though, painting has taken over as my influence. Doron Langberg and Daniel Crews-Chubb completely blow my mind.
I have a lot of thanks to the team at BOYS! BOYS! BOYS! Paul McDonald and Ghislain Pascal re-shaped my practice and thinking back in 2022 after becoming stagnant with where I was at for a long time. And a lot comes from the MA programme I’ve just completed. The teaching and the range of artists and ideas I was exposed to at London College of Communication really changed the way I think about making work as an extension of photography.
If you could change one thing about how people experience your work, what would it be?
At a solo exhibition at MoMA. I have big goals, and that’s one of them. More realistically, I’d love for more people to experience the work in person. My current practice doesn’t fully translate on a screen. The materials, scale, and physical presence are all part of the work, and that’s something you can only really appreciate when you’re standing in front of it.
How to find Fergus:
https://www.instagram.com/fergus_carmichael_winterbon/
Mentioned artists and galleries:
Wolfgang Tillmans
https://www.tillmans.co.uk/
https://www.tillmans.co.uk/
Ana Mendieta
Laura Aguilar
Mark McKnight
Doron Langberg
Daniel Crews-Chubb
BOYS! BOYS! BOYS!
Paul McDonald
MoMA
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