PWCs

A couple of weeks back we went to a very funny musical play (that I shall not name) showing at an excellent theater (that I shall not name).  Its original setting had been changed to take place in a cowboy bar.  The theater was configured with a flat floor and audience on three sides.  We had first row seats (our favorite) so our feet were nearly on the edge of the stage.  When the house opened and the audience trooped in, the costumed actors were already on stage playing guitars, etc., singing, and chatting up the audience – that was invited to come on stage.  In fact there was ad hoc seating on stage and members of the audience were invited to stay on stage – or come and go – during the play and the actors were prepared to shoo them out of the way when needed.  There was also an open bar at one side of the set and the audience was invited to visit the bar at any time during the play.  With one thing and another it was a goofy, unconventional approach to theater that promised to be a lot of fun – and it was.

There was not the “Welcome to …” nor was there the customary “Recording devices and photography are not permitted.” announcement.  

Which brings me to PWCs – people with cellphones.  As cheerful audience members swarmed over the stage there was the inevitable quick draw of smart phones (some with selfie sticks) and even a couple of tablets.  Sitting in my front row seat I thought “Well, they are ok with photographs; at least until the performance begins.”  I had been out photographing earlier in the day so my 35mm film camera was in my shoulder bag.  I got it out and got exactly four frames before an usher, also in costume, rushed over saying “No photographs!  No photographs!”  I lowered my camera and said “What about all the people photographing with their cell phones.  Are you going to stop them, too?”  He looked embarrassed, said “No photographs.” (rather sheepishly) once more and walked back to his post.  

The cell phone barrage continued throughout the show.  (sigh)

On Reading -- Stealing from the best.

Nearly all of my photographs organize themselves into loosely-defined, open-ended projects that are never finished but often stop at an interesting place for a portfolio, show, or hand-made book. 

People often ask; “Where do you get ideas for your projects?”  British photographer and educator, David Hurn says; “Our advice to photographers is best expressed by Calvin Trilling: ‘The immature artist borrows; the mature artist steals.’  So steal from the best.”

I’m certainly stealing from the best for this one.  In the 1970s the great Andre Kertesz published a charming book titled “On Reading”.  Quite a few years later I stumbled upon it in the public library and not too long after that my wonderful wife (at the time a used book dealer) found me a copy of my own.  It has since been reprinted in paper cover but my vintage hardback is way cooler.

The Seattle area (where we live) is more than a bit bookish so it isn’t at all hard to find raw material for my own “On Reading” project.  In fact, I sorted through my negatives and found quite a few already there and I’ve added to the project from time to time ever since.  People who are reading are easy marks — lost in their book the rest of the world kind of fades away.  Here’s one from Honolulu:

I put this photograph up on my website and some months later received an email from an author/educator who was writing a textbook for aspiring primary grade teachers.  She wanted to use it as the cover photograph on her book.  Here’s the good part: She teaches at the University of Silesia in Poland!  Isn’t the internet wonderful sometimes?

Closer to home is this vendor at a farmers’ market in Portland, Oregon.  She was definitely paying more attention to the latest Barbara Kingsolver novel than to her baked goods.  Books are a good conversation starter — we talked current novels for a few minutes before she sold me a chocolate croissant and went back to reading.

And the most recent.  If I just go out to take photographs I usually come back empty handed.  If I go out to photograph with the agenda of working on a given project I will usually come back with something I like but not necessarily what I expected.  I suspect that this has to do with looking for something instead of just looking.  This day I started out looking for photographs of street musicians and came back with this.

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.