Note to self: "Self, never print this negative again."

I’m not very keen on juried shows.  Most of them seem to me to be cash cows for the sponsoring gallery or organization.  However, I do occasionally submit prints to shows at LightBox Gallery in Astoria, Oregon.  It is a very nice gallery and rental darkroom/studio and their shows are plenty good enough that I am pleased when I get a print in one of them.  I submitted this print and four others to their upcoming “Photographic Nude” show.  This one was accepted and that will be the third time I have had a print in one of their shows.

I took this photograph at the Fremont solstice parade a few years back.  It is one of my favorites from the solstice parade and I had printed it three times – each time getting a print that was more successful but still not quite what I wanted.  After looking back at the existing prints, I decided to give it one more try before putting a print in a frame for LightBox.

Why, you may well ask, did I need to print it again?  It is what could be understatedly called a ‘difficult’ negative.   It was taken on a very sunny day but I was standing on the shadowed side of the street and the shadow extended a few feet into the street in front of me.  My manual exposure camera was set to photograph the parade as it went down the brightly lit street.  

The girl in this photograph, one of the naked bicyclist posse, was tearing down the parade route close to the curb – in the shadow – where I was standing.  I saw her coming just in time to focus close and tag the shutter button.  She was very close to me – this photograph was taken with a 50mm lens so she was very close. Result: a seriously backlit negative.  The negative image of her body is very thin and the street behind her is very dense.  Problem: how to lift her out of the background without leaving the busy background washed out – and how to make her image contrasty enough to obviously be the most interesting item in the print.

So I said to myself: “Self, you are a better printer now than you were a few years ago.  Have another pop at it.”  And I am.  And I did; with two filters, three exposures and a windmill of dodging and burning.  And I did make a better print than the previous versions; a print that I am pleased to send off to a show where there will be a lot of fine prints.

And I’m done.  The next time I feel the urge to make a better print from this negative I’m going to go drink a cup of tea and wait for the urge to go away.  Or maybe scan the negative and beat on it with Photoshop.

 

The case of the vanishing craftsman.

While looking for a negative I happened to see this one as it went by.   

A few years ago (well, actually 13) Photographic Center Northwest announced that they were sponsoring a workshop led by Bruce Davidson.  I’m not that keen on workshops and a cheapskate to boot but I couldn’t turn down the opportunity to spend a weekend with one of my heroes, the photographer who did “East 100^th Street”.  I was in Seattle for something else so I dropped in to PCNW to register for it.  

Erin-at-the-counter signed me up and gave me the prospectus for the workshop, scheduled for three weeks hence.  She told me to look at the prospectus right away since there was some homework assigned before the time of the workshop.  The advance homework ran like this:

Find a potentially interesting situation involving a person or people that you have never met.  Introduce yourself and chat them up, explain what you are doing, and shoot a couple of rolls of film.  Make work prints of the best few of your negatives and bring them to the first day of the workshop.  Make extra copies to give to the person or people you photographed.

OK, I can do that.  In fact that’s not so far from what I do anyway.

I walked down 12^th from PCNW towards Madison to catch a downtown bus.  At the corner of 12^th and Madison there stood (it has subsequently been demolished and replaced with an upscale retail/condo building) a commercial building that had once housed some kind of light-industrial manufacturer.  The street level windows on 12^th and on Madison had been painted white and there was only one door onto the street – I had never seen it open or seen any lights on inside.  That day the lights were on, visible through the upper panes of glass in the high window frames, and the door was open.  Naturally, I peeked in.

The large, high-ceilinged room was filled with a mixture of some kind of industrial machinery towards the back and a whole lot of old but expensive looking furniture towards the door – tables, sideboards, bookcases, chairs, and chests of drawers.  One man was removing old varnish from a piece of furniture with the air of a person who very clearly knew what he was doing.  He saw me, put down his tools, and came over to say hello.  Well, said I to myself, I have a camera on my neck, he looks friendly, and this looks promising.  And it was.

He introduced himself as Silas; I introduced myself and we shook hands.  He told me that the machinery at the back was industrial sewing machines – that’s what was manufactured there at one time.  The owner of the business still bought and sold such machinery and that was his stock.  He had an employee who repaired and refurbished the sewing machines.  As a sideline, the owner also bought and sold high-quality antique furniture and his job was doing needed repairs and refinishing the pieces.  They had recently acquired a huge lot of furniture and he had a couple of months work ahead of him to get it ready for sale – working there by himself, he was glad to have somebody to talk to a bit.  He showed me a few of the pieces that he had refinished and they looked like something out of a museum.  

We chatted for a while longer while I photographed and then he went back to work while I photographed some more.  I told him I would bring him some prints and he assured me that he would be there every weekday for several weeks.  I left feeling that my homework was ready to develop and print and all was well.

A few days later I got an announcement from PCNW that they had cancelled the Bruce Davidson workshop for lack of enough registration.  Damn!  But I developed the film and made work prints to take back to Silas.  

Problem was – he wasn’t there.  Over the following couple of weeks I went by several times at several different times of day.  The lights were off and the door was locked.  Finally I scrambled up on a wide windowsill to peek through a bare spot on the lower window and saw nothing but an empty room – no machines, no furniture, no tools.  There was no sign on the door saying “call this number for….”.  Damn, again!

I have no idea what happened nor could I find any information about the business that he described to me.  My fantasy is that it only existed because I needed it and that when the workshop was cancelled so was it.

 

 

Another Memory Triggered

A while back I wrote about having slogged through Roland Barthes’ Camera Lucida.  It was pretty sticky going but I did agree with much of what he said once I had found the needles in his literary haystack.  (see 2014 blog post “Roland Barthes Deconstructed”)  One of his gems, buried in page after page of convoluted prose, is that photography more than any other visual medium can evoke a memory.  (see 2014 blog posts “Water Music” and “Portrait of Harold”).

Boy, did that happen again today. 

For the past couple of years I’ve been reprinting old negatives in addition to making new ones.  My original goal was to reprint perhaps 100 older negatives in a common format.  It’s now up to 200 or so and I’m betting on 300 before the tide comes in all the way.

The photograph above is from the Fremont Solstice Parade in 2009.  As soon as the first test print came up in the developer the circumstances when I took the photograph were as clear in my mind as if it were yesterday – perhaps more clear because at the time I was preoccupied with photographing the parade.

I had arrived on 35^th early enough to get a prime spot on the curb west of “the center of the known universe” in Fremont.  I was standing but most of the other early birds were sitting on the curb.  To my right was a middle-aged woman and by the time she arrived the curb was completely occupied for blocks on either side.

The girl in the picture and her mom wandered up.  Mom took up a position behind me and to my right with her little girl in front of her.  Middle-aged woman on the curb turned and said: “I do NOT want that child to stand behind me and if she does I will make sure that she doesn’t enjoy it.”

Mom, the couple sitting on the curb to the right of middle-aged woman, and I all looked at her with what I’m sure was a “Did she really say that?” expression.  Little girl, who likely had never heard a grown up say something that nasty, looked like she was going to cry.  Without planning or thought I said to little girl “Come stand in front of me.  I’m not an old crab.”  Middle-aged woman gave me one of the dirtiest looks in the history of non-verbal communication.  Little girl, rather shyly, moved in front of me and her mom completely lost it -- fell into a gale of out-of-control laughter.  So did the people to the right of middle-aged woman. 

The happy ending is that middle-aged woman said “WELL!”, got up and walked away.  Mom sat down on the curb and little girl stood beside her (as in the photograph).  Mom continued to bubble over into fits of giggles now and again for some time.

Turns out that little girl’s auntie/cousin/older sister/? was one of the nude bicyclists that year.  I asked her to be sure to clap her hands and cheer when she went by and she did so.

Every Photograph is a Battle....

Gary Winogrand claimed that every photograph is a battle between form and content.  If  you expand ‘form’ to include print quality and change ‘battle’ to ‘race’ then I really agree with this.

I’m big on content (see January 2010).  That is not to say that I don’t spend a lot of effort trying to make my prints sing.  I want it all.   Sometimes I have to accept that a print is only going to hum loudly.  I just made one (above). 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I really like this photograph – the content: mom and daughter going off to a Paris street market on a chilly Saturday.  The form: not so much. 

The negative is just a bit soft, depth of field is right where I want it but the background/foreground contrast is low, it’s a grab shot so there is a lot of extra background to be cropped off.  After three head-banging sessions in the darkroom I have declared victory at the “loud hum” level.  That’s as good as it’s going to get.

One of my all-time favorites is by the great Willy Ronis – “Merchands de frites, Rue Rambeteau, 1946”.   

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Two young women are behind the counter of a sidewalk shop.  The print is grainy, it’s not very sharp, the skin tones are muddy on one face, it was obviously strained out of a very soft negative.  I suspect that the tapestry of Ronis’ French profanity while he was printing it is still hanging over Paris somewhere.   Would either of these prints be ‘better’ if they were tack-sharp, if the subject/background separation was more obvious, if the skin tones were opened up?  Beats me.

I try to keep Ronis’ print in mind when I am watching the form versus content race.  The best outcome of the battle is a draw in which both win.  Sometimes content wins and form is close enough.  Sometimes form wins (and the print winds up in the recycle bin).

“Terminal” Show at Photo Center NW

Until April 5 at Photographic Center NW in Seattle

This show includes photographs from a lot of big name photographers.  The signature photograph, in addition to the piece hung in the gallery, is presented in a translucent wrap on the large show windows facing on 12^th Avenue.  It is of a woman lying in a hospital bed looking directly at the camera.  Clearly in great distress, she is the photographer, Eugene Richards’, wife who shortly after the photograph was taken died of metastatic cancer.  The title is “The Last Chemo Treatment”.

I would not for a moment claim that Mr. Richards or any of the other photographers whose work is in the show should not have taken the photographs.  Nor would I claim for a moment that curator and PCNW director Michelle Dunn Marsh should not have conceived of this show or curated it.

However, I can confidently claim that I would not have done so.

 

“At the moment of love and the moment of death we should turn our heads.” 

-- Henri Cartier-Bresson

 

Yep.

A portriat of Harold

While looking for something else I found the negative of this portrait -- taken 25 years ago.  I had no idea why I didn't print it then so I printed it Tuesday.  Not a bad portrait if I do say so myself and the little scrap of picture frame in the upper left corner keeps it from looking like something taken against white seamless.  I wish that I could claim that I included it on purpose.

Before reading further, take a minute to look carefully at this portrait.  ...... Done?  Ok -- With no context it is a portrait of an older man, at ease, dark eyes not directed at the camera, thoughtful expression -- or is it wistful?  He is casually dressed and his hair is rumpled, moustache could use a trim -- clearly not a person for whom looking nattily attired and formal is important.

Here's the first layer of context.  Harold is an artist -- a well-known artist -- who draws, paints, sculpts, and does enameled metal panels.  He has works in a whole lot of museum collections and public art commissioned work in at least Alaska and Washington State.  He is also an accomplished teacher of art.  Does that change your perception?  Is his expression one of contemplating a drawing in progress, a conversation with a student, an idea for a new piece?  Is his appearance congruent with your image of a successful artist?

Second layer.  At the time, Harold, several other people, and I were instructors at a week-long workshop camp for gifted high-school students.  The students, from high schools all over the state, were incredibly smart, talented, and hardworking.  The workshops were all in the arts -- photography, drawing, theater, writing, musical composition -- except for my geekshop on artificial intelligence and one on oceanography.  At the end of the week the staff all met with the workshop organizers to debrief, relax, and congratulate each other on being able to stay ahead of the students (a daunting task).  All of the staff agreed that we had never had so much fun in the classroom or studio/classroom.  I took this photograph during that meeting.  Now what?  Is he tired from a very long but intense week with a gaggle of brilliant young people?  Is he wishing that all his classes were that rewarding?

One of Roland Barthes' hot buttons is the ability of a photograph, more than any other kind of art, to bring a rush of memory to the viewer.  (However, he takes quite a few pages to say that.)  As soon as I saw this negative the memory of what was happening at the time certainly came back to me in a rush.  I can visualize the cast of characters around the table and nearly verbatim the conversation.

The theater workshop leader, Susan, was describing her very successful week. Each evening during the week one of the workshop leaders presented a program to all the staff and students on their own work.  For her program, Susan did a series of short vignettes, portraying a different character in each one.  Between the vignettes, Susan took a few seconds on stage to become the next character --  expression, body language, posture, and accent.  Without costumes or scenery and only a few simple props, she became a stuffy male investment banker, a depressed and harried housewife, a glamour photographer’s model, a little girl upset about her first day at school -- and several others.  She was dazzling!  She was magic!  She was completely believable in each new persona. 

She was not only an excellent teacher but a wonderful role model especially for the girls that (like Susan) were not particularly physically attractive.  One of her students later told me that they were all convinced that Susan could walk up the wall and across the ceiling if she wanted to.  Susan's workshop had convinced her for the first time that her own ordinary looks did not bar her from acting.

Just before I took this photograph Susan had recounted that the parents of two of the girls that had signed up for her workshop had withdrawn their daughters at the last minute when they found out that Susan was lesbian.  That's what Harold, and all the rest of us, were contemplating. 

Roland Barthes deconstructed

A year or so ago a friend of a friend asked me to be a guest speaker at the beginning photography class that he was teaching at a small local college.  He, the teacher, is not a photographer but instead was a freshly minted MFA and adjunct faculty member of their fledgling art department.  He felt that having a real live photographer talk to the class, show some work, and participate in the class critique of the student's assignment for the week would be a good idea.  I agreed to do so and it turned out to be a lot of fun.  I spoke about why I do the work I do, how I do it, whose work I admire and why, and how I get my work shown.  The class was about evenly divided between students who needed a liberal arts credit and students who were really interested in photography. 

Near the end of the Q&A session following my talk one of the latter, a young woman who had already asked several perceptive questions asked: "Have you read Barthes?" (Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida).  I allowed that I had, indeed, taken a run at it several years ago but had found it nearly impenetrable and had given up on about page 10.  My answer elicited a growl of agreement from the class so I enquired why she asked that question.  It turned out that they had been assigned to read Camera Lucida as an introduction to the appreciation of photography as an art form.   Their instructor, looking a bit sheepish, allowed that the class had found it to be a difficult read.

Time passed.

I happened upon a copy of Camera Lucida in a used book store for a dollar and decided, with 20 or so additional years of reading about photography under my belt, that I would take another shot at it. 

Yep, it is a difficult read.  This time, however, I soldiered through to the end.  Here's my synopsis:

Photography has a unique ability to record what something or somebody looked like at a specific time and place.  This gives it the power to be a window into the past that no other visual art has.  Some photographs are interesting, even compelling simply because of their historical, cultural, or anthropological content.  Others, less common, are fascinating beyond that.  The latter photographs have a property that isn't related to specific subject matter or photographic style because they are scattered through many genres and many photographer's works.  He would like to discuss these two attractions to certain photographs using the methods and vocabulary of philosophy but can't figure out how to do so even though he has given them borrowed Latin names.  Since the methods of philosophical discourse don't seem to work his next strategy is to examine some photographs that exhibit the latter and try to infer the general from the specific. 

At this point, about 40 pages into the book, I was pretty excited about it -- apart from the fact that he took 40 or so pages of very convoluted text to get through the paragraph above.  I, too, feel that some photographs have some property that I cannot articulate that makes them very special.  I, too, have examined every photograph I find that I feel possesses this magic quality (which my friend Bryan calls foo-ness – see the footnote) and have attempted with very limited success to infer the general from the specific.

Several days later I picked up Camera Lucida and opened it to the bookmarked page (page 90) and read the lead sentence of the first paragraph: "I can put this another way."  The words that popped into my mind were: "Oh, please don't!  Spare me!"  In the intervening pages he had described a variety of photographs that  move him deeply and concluded that they do so because of some detail, often trivial, in them that related to his own life experience -- a landscape (urban or rural) in which he feels he could habitez, more like "inhabit" than "live there".  In the case of a James Vanderzee portrait of a family, one of the women is wearing a necklace that reminds him of one that his mother wore.  These connections are, of course, intensely personal and he opines that there must be something more universal.

He then went through an exhausting (not exhaustive) examination of a series of photographs of his mother ending up with a snapshot of her at about age five and winds his way back to what he started with in the introduction -- photography is unique in the art world because it works only if the photographer (operator) aims the camera at the subject (referent) and pushes the button at a specific instant.  [Obviously, he did not consider the work of Jerry Uelsmann.]  By so doing the photograph opens a window into the past. 

In the final 30 or so pages, he continued to belabor the notion of a photograph as a window into the past and as a reminder of death either already happened or yet to come.  This is an issue I sometimes think of: "This lovely young woman was dead before I was born."   However, his "This was but is no more." while true hardly seems like a pivotal reason why photography is different from every other visual art form. 

In 119 pages (less a few pages of photographs) of very dense and convoluted text he has looped back to what he stated in the introduction with the sole addition of the memento mori reference to the photograph as a reminder of death.

Moreover, contrary to my going in opinion (at page 40) that he was trying to track down the properties that make specific photographs "special" while others are not his goal was to uncover the universals that make all photographs different from other visual art mediums.  Moreover, he is attempting to wrap words around something (he was a professor of lexicology, after all) that I am convinced is essentially visual -- that may not even have words to describe it -- and that's ok with me.

I'm glad I slogged through this swamp but it is clearly a Bryan type 1 experience (something for which once is definitely enough) and no help at all in my quest for foo-ness.  Leave out the memento mori and the late Bill Jay, teacher of photography and prolific (and highly opinionated) writer about photography sums it up in two sentences:

Photography has the unique ability to show what something or somebody looked like at a specific time and place.  The only hard bits in photography are which way to point the camera and when to push the button.

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*About foo-ness:

The term "foo" originated, as far as I know, in the absurdist comic strip Smokey Stover -- although the strip's author, Bill Holman, contended that it means "good luck" in Chinese.  Smokey was a fire-fighter (foo fighter).  I wonder if the members of the post-grunge band, Foo Fighters, know about Smokey or were even born when the strip was current.

Holman made a serious but ineffectual effort to introduce "foo" into the English language, perhaps inspired by the possibly apocryphal story about a wag who introduced "quiz" into English overnight by hiring urchins to write the word on walls all over Dublin.  However, "foo" did enter a language -- just not English.  Practitioners of the computer language LISP (in my opinion an absurdist computer language) adopted "foo" to mean something, anything, important but not yet defined.  From LISP, "foo" migrated into C, C++ and likely a lot of other computer languages that have evolved since I stopped even trying to keep track.

When I began trying to identify the mysterious properties that made a few photographs so extremely compelling, my friend Bryan suggested that the property was obviously "foo-ness" -- important but not yet defined, perhaps indefinable.