I'm much better in person.
I put together a new site, The Ship Escaped.com, which features the work that I’ve been calling ‘The Process’ here. Please do visit, you’ll find work there that you haven’t seen before on this blog. Feedback welcome and encouraged, thanks for looking.
A very recent photo. The lab technician made some sort of sloppy error, fogging the first few frames of the film… if you look closely you can see some brushstokes of red, which I enjoy, an accidental nod to the properties of film. The print of it has wonderful subtleties that don’t come through in the above scan. If this were an editorial assignment, I’d want to read an interview with that cat.
Personally, this is one of the most important photographs I’ve ever made. I took this eight years ago at a moment (and I really mean an instant) when I realized that I was indeed an adult, responsible for the direction and scope of my life. As a disclaimer, it’s not like I was into anything nefarious or even irresponsible at that time. I was just realizing how much (or little) control we have and what it all boils down to. We are our own entities. Happiness lies within.
I met several people this weekend that added to my understanding of this, reconfirming what I knew, each individual with a presence as thick as a book. How does this relate to photography?
Photography is one of the few mediums where you can quickly make something and then feed it back to yourself. I don’t need this photo nearly as much for guidance or reference anymore, but it’s still helpful. And there’s nothing on the market that I could buy that would match it, for that specific type of potency.
Over the holiday weekend, midday at a bar near the Gowanus canal, after five tries, I got a sequence I was happy with. I have never enjoyed gambling in any form, but I knew I got off easy at only $15. I would have spent every dollar I had.
Richard Avedon had this to offer in paying homage to his mentor, photographer/designer/instructor Alexey Brodovitch, ” …and when I taught, the first assignment was to go into a photomat (booth) and see what you can do. …And then when (my students) come in with a little strip of four pictures I say, ‘Well, now what are you going to do,’ and I keep them in the photomat for six or eight weeks until they are rephotgraphing, bringing broken glass into the photomat and photographing through it, enlarging, then photocopying the photomat images, blowing them up, destroying the image, working with it. All this starts with Brodovitch forty years ago.”
This quote comes from ‘The New York School Photographs 1936-1963′ and it’s one of the finest photography books that I own. It only took me forty five minutes to find this quote. (You won’t find it on the internet. Well.. now you will.) Go see if your library has it or buy a copy.
I’ve been avoiding (delaying really) an important part of the process. The Print. I’ve made some test scans of two negatives and had one printed at 13″x19″ but wasn’t entirely happy with the results. The color and feel of the digital enlargement hasn’t reached the quality of the original 4″x6″ C-print. Avoidance is a close friend of mine so it will take some work to push through and get it right instead of postponing the running of more test prints, trying to get nearer to the match print.
The last part of my fear is sharpness and large sizes. While I do love the Olympus Stylus I fear that when I enlarge some of the photos (a small but important percentage) I’ll find flaws will trigger my obsessiveness. The majority of the work is shot without flash and flash tends to crispen things up. I stared at the above print (after avoiding it for awhile) and came up with the conclusion that it’s sharp. Hopefully it won’t be an issue when it’s printed larger.
It is all a part of the Process and I have only two options. Embrace the process with all of its flaws as well as its beauty at being part of classic traditional photography (* except for the digital C-print finale’) or change the process.
In the end we could all vanish tomorrow, there are no guarantees and I don’t believe in the afterlife. Even as I type this I should be out making photographs.
