I just discovered a gallery of cameraless Polaroid prints from Lisa McCarty. What an absolute treat! Just like tiny Abstract Expressionist paintings.
Go visit and enjoy them for yourself. Find out how far you can be transported in just a few moments!
When I make my cyanotype photogram “astrofauxtographs,” I often think about the achingly beautiful images made by space probes, such as this one taken of Saturn’s moon, Enceladus, by the Cassini spacecraft.
I know they’re meant to be scientific documents. And if you dig through NASA’s photo archive you’ll see plenty of unspectacular photographs with loads of useful data. They’re the result of a specific observation of a subject from a certain angle.
Generally, they don’t sing. But sometimes, they do.
What a universe we live in!
“Dark Moon, Dramatic Plume” Image courtesy of NASA. https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/resources/15473/dark-moon-dramatic-plume/
Quiet Campus is a double-sided, eight-page zine full of photographs that I’ve been making while working at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts (UNCSA).
I’m a UNCSA staffer, so I’m on campus year-round. During the normal ebb and flow of the education cycle, I see our spaces both bursting with life and peacefully empty. These photographs are from quiet moments. They represent pretty well how our campus looks right now during the Covid-19 pandemic.
But here’s the beautiful part. If you look carefully, you can see signs of artists’ work. We’ll be back there soon enough to fill the space with life and make new marks. Until then, please enjoy this gift.
Quiet Campus is dedicated to all of the UNCSA students, and especially the class of 2020. This is where you created what you are today.
Want a copy? You have two options.
This is a free cultural work. (CC BY-SA 4.0)
“Most people probably find it strange, what I do. Taking photos of strangers.
Some would probably argue that you exploit these people when you take their photo and put it on Instagram. I don’t know if I think it’s okay, myself. In a way, it’s not okay.But I feel it’s necessary for someone to document the realities.”
Malek Bigum, from his Ilford #MyFilmStory.
That’s an interesting, thorny question. How should we balance privacy with historical documentation? I won’t even try to answer, because in the very next quote Bigum explains his stance against manufactured perfection in a way that is, for me, absolute perfection.
See it for yourself.
John Riddy makes quiet, exquisitely composed photographs of everyday places. In this video he talks about the thought processes that happen while he makes his work.
I recognize something in his photographs that I’m looking for in my own. Hearing him talk about his approach helps me clarify mine. He treats the space in a photograph like “curtains on a stage” and considers spaces that do not normally attract our attention. The idea of recording a novelty because of it’s attention-grabbing nature is completely absent in his work.
Here’s a quote where Riddy explains how he places his camera.
I start to move the camera around on the tripod. I find this point of stillness in relation to what I’m photographing that seems to be absolutely and completely right. There’s only one place for the lens to go.
Or maybe it’s just better to watch him explain it.
Thank you to Tate for your excellent TateShots series!
Filmmaker Wim Wenders, a fellow Polaroid lover, speaks frankly about Polaroids and photography in the 21st century in this article from The Guardian. In 2017 he collected his remaining Polaroids and mounted an exhibition, Instant Stories.
So Instant Stories is also an elegy for the Polaroid itself, and all it stood for. “At the time, it was part of everyday life, another thing you used for living – like food and air and the stinky cars we were driving and the cigarettes everyone was smoking. Today, making a Polaroid is just a process.”
He sighs and rubs his eyes. “The culture has changed. It has all gone. I really don’t know why we stick to the word photography any more. There should be a different term, but nobody cared about finding it.”
Wenders, too, now regards photography as a thing of the past. “It’s not just the meaning of the image that has changed – the act of looking does not have the same meaning. Now, it’s about showing, sending and maybe remembering. It is no longer essentially about the image. The image for me was always linked to the idea of uniqueness, to a frame and to composition. You produced something that was, in itself, a singular moment. As such, it had a certain sacredness. That whole notion is gone.”
Want to hear about it in his own words? Watch this.
These are film holders. We large format photographers don’t get to use roll film and blast through lots of exposures before reloading. We put our film in the camera one sheet at a time using these big, beautiful tools.
On the left is a 4-by-5 holder. And on the right is an 8-by-10. Those numbers are inches, by the way. Each holder has two sides, so it can carry two sheets of film. You can tell these are unloaded because the dark slide has the dark side facing out and there’s no label that notes what type of film is loaded.
For use, you insert the film holder in the camera and remove the dark side. That handle-looking thing at the top lets you slide the entire front panel up and out of the holder. This uncovers the film so that the lens can project an image on it. After the exposure, you reinsert the dark slide, but with the black side facing out. (The other side is silver.) This indicates that that particular piece of film has been exposed.
When I unload the exposed film, I also remove the film type label so I can tell if the holder is empty or has exposed film in it that needs processing.
Simple, right? You get used to it.
Here’s what the negatives look like once they’re processed and dried. The 8-by-10 negative on the right has the same image area as an entire 36-exposure roll of 35mm film. Can you imagine all that information storage capacity dedicated to just one image? It’s glorious. That’s what makes it worth dragging around this ginormous camera.
For me, proud is an interior state. I don’t do it out loud. But I was pushed to write about the thing I’m most proud of in my work recently, and figured maybe it could help someone else. So here goes.
The thing in my work that I’m most proud of is quitting my film career. I used to work as a compositor on feature films. Look me up on IMDB and you’ll see a big list of films, some of them pretty well known. It was an extremely challenging job and I was good at it. It sounded impressive at dinner parties, requiring a careful explanation that still sometimes left folks puzzled, but impressed. But it was brutal from a life-work balance perspective. It’s hard to put down roots when you know you’ll have to move to a different city—maybe even a different continent—again in a year or two. Never knowing if you’ll be home for dinner or bedtime, never knowing when weekend plans will have to be scrapped, it’s rough on the family dynamic.
So I quit. Because life and family is more important than work. My job is a bit more modest now, but I’m home every evening for dinner, and I have time for my darkroom.
I don’t regret that decision one bit. Especially when I can duck out in the middle of the day to view an eclipse with my favorite people.
Thank you to Jessica Singerman for the photo.
The camera I learned to make photographs with was not mine. It belonged to my dad. And it got stolen from my apartment—along with a nice collection of his lenses—two weeks after I moved to Philly in 1993. That hurt. It was a sweet, silver SRT-101. Dad had bought it around the time I was born and he always brought it with him. I got this camera as a replacement.
I took most of the following pictures with it. Except for the weird ones. Those are from a plastic camera, contact print of a magazine page, and my first homemade wooden pinhole camera. I’ll let you figure out which is which. The last one was my favorite photograph from the early 90s. I poached it from the nuns’ garden at Tyler School of Art. This is back in the day, before Tyler moved onto the Temple main campus. We were supposed to stay out of there, but they had statuary, I was a gloomy kid, and well, you only live once.
Jessica caught me playing with tiny versions of my big prints tonight. I’m planning the layout of my show in the Redding Corridor Gallery at Sawtooth School for Visual Art this August. Too many moving parts to arrange the prints on the computer, so I’m pushing these little prints around until they sit well together.
These photographs are all from the Winston-Salem project. I’ve been documenting buildings in low-traffic areas of my adopted home town. You’d be surprised how much things change. A few of these subjects no longer exist. That number could go up by August.
Thank you to Jessica Singerman for the photo.
