mossless just interviewed Toronto dude Mark Peckmezian who I think does really great, thoughtful work:

Mark Peckmezian is 24 and just graduated from Ryerson a couple weeks ago.

MOSSLESS: Do you have any darkroom rituals?
MARK PECKMEZIAN: I do. I consider printing, especially for my snapshot stuff, a huge part of the process; sometimes an image is not just enhanced by its treatment, but virtually made by it. Ultimately, I try to treat every image according to its own needs. In a banal sense, this means that I make specific choices in paper, developer, toner, etc. for each image. More interestingly, I use particular printing treatments to sort of properly “frame” the meaning of the image. For instance, printing the image with a large white “tab” on the bottom is one treatment with a specific effect associated with it: write a number or date in that space and the image instantly reads as “document” or “note.” There are many more: printing the image small within a large sheet (connotes preciousness or, depending on the image content, deadpan), ripping the paper edge (connotes a casualness or informality, especially useful for undermining any potential cheesiness), printing a test-strip version of an image (test strips being the darkroom equivalent of a sketch, it makes the print seem like mere “process work” as opposed to “product work,” which induces a critically less-strict viewing), printing many small variations of an image (shifts attention to the process and to the graphic qualities of the image). I think these treatments are all the more powerful because they, I think, seem incidental or accidental, and thus bypass the viewer’s critical radar to a degree. I think this is one of the reasons I love working in analog so much: Digital is a world of total control and thus of total responsibility. I find that stifling.

ML: Do you have a manifesto or common ideology to everything you shoot?
MP: Yes and no. My only real, self-consciously held ideology is to not have an ideology, but I recognize that, if you add up my beliefs and value, I inevitably have what amounts to an ideology. I don’t know how to describe that, really. I can say that I strongly value affective-ness in art (I have little patience for art that is highly remote and accessed only intellectually). I really value creativity and, although I come up short most of the time, that’s a common-denominator aspiration behind much of what I do — if you’re not doing anything that is in some way new, why do it at all?
But the really important ideology is, yeah, to not really have one. I think ideologies mislead much more often than they guide, and I think you could diagnose a lot of bad art as having this (dogmatism) as their root problem. It’s important to keep your eye on what actually matters, which is the actual-fact experience of viewing your work, the net consequence of your art — practice always trumps theory, in a nutshell.

ML: Matt Tammaro (who we’ve interviewed) is your roommate. What’s it like to live with another photographer?
MP: Technically speaking we are ex-roommates — he moved out a few days ago — but the question still stands, as I lived with him for a year and live now with another photographer, a filmmaker, and a fashion designer (we share a studio loft in downtown Toronto). There are obvious perks to this (instant feedback, free assisting, shared equipment, etc) but I think the real value is just having your whole world be art-tinged, where there is no separation between work, play, and home life. 

ML: What’s the difference between photographs and pictures?
MP: Ha, good question. I divided the work on my website into these two categories for practical reasons, mostly. I have a ton of work and thought a lot of it was suitable for inclusion on my site, but I couldn’t figure out a way to properly categorize it. I was reminded of Vice magazine dividing up music into “Beats” and “Guitars” (I don’t know if they still do this) — highly-colloquial descriptions can be strangely accurate, I think, or at least highly useful. In my mind, “Photographs” are the “serious” images, the product of planned shoots and with higher production values; “Pictures” are basically “snapshots,” incidental, candid photos, or photos that I otherwise just don’t have much invested in — sketches, jokes, things I’m unsure of. I consider the “Pictures” more junky, and always have, but time has tended to reverse these designated values: I sort of like and value more strongly the more “stupid” or junky “Pictures,” and I think, on the whole, people respond more to them than to the “Photographs.”