Adam Bellefeuil

Raleigh, North Carolina, USA

Please introduce yourself: What is your name, where are you from, what do you do?

My name is Adam Bellefeuil. I grew up in suburban Detroit, Michigan and live in Raleigh, North Carolina where I work as a video game designer. I've worked in the video games industry for the past eighteen years.

What is your relationship with photography? How did you get into it and what keeps you interested or motivated?

I've always enjoyed looking at photographs but I didn't start making my own in a serious way until a long trip around the Mediterranean with my wife in 2011. I brought a camera and made a lot of bad travel pictures, mostly.

When I returned I wanted to keep shooting so I started walking around town with a couple friends who were also interested in photography. I looked at photo books for inspiration and began to study the history of the medium and I just haven't stopped.

I started using Instagram a few years back as a sketchbook with the self-imposed rule that I would only post pictures made with my phone and with minimal editing. The idea being that if I could make compelling pictures using only my phone without the aid of fancy filters—I use the default iPhone Mono filter for B&W—and editing then I would be improving not just my photography but my vision itself.

I've stayed true to that goal for the most part, but recently I started posting pictures of my prints made with my film cameras — taken with my phone, of course!

For the past three years I've been exploring the state of North Carolina on Sunday mornings, leaving before sunrise and heading back home around lunch. I've been to nearly every town and many rural areas within two hours drive. For this, I have worked primarily with medium format black and white film and 6x7 cameras.

The Sunday morning schedule is not only a necessity for me—I have a full-time job and growing family—but has also been a great way to learn about how light affects my pictures in different weather and at different times of year.

The whole experience of going out with no other purpose but to get lost and make pictures is a thrill and it never gets old. As Robert Adams said, «No place is boring, if you've had a good night's sleep and have a pocket full of unexposed film.»

What are you currently working on, and—if there is—what is your next project or journey?

I don't tend to work with projects in mind, but I do have several bodies of work—mostly defined by location—that I'm always adding to: Cross Road is the name of my North Carolina Sunday adventures.

Grand Prairie is pictures made in Texas where my wife is from and where I lived before we moved to Raleigh; we return to visit at least once per year. River is pictures made along the Eno River in North Carolina where I have been spending a lot of time recently.

And Black Basin, which I haven't worked on for a couple of years but hope to return to someday, is photographs of houses at night. It helps me to loosely organize my pictures like this, but I don't really think of them as ‹projects›.

I'm currently finishing up my first handmade photo book which uses pictures from more than one of these bodies of work. More on that soon.

Thank you, Adam!

Editorial Notes:

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Photography: Adam Bellefeuil (2018)
Location: Raleigh, North Carolina, USA

Links: Website, Instagram

Raleigh, North Carolina, USA

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