My Big Phat Wedding Day Photograph
My daughter, Julia, spent a bunch of hours this past year rummaging through my Polaroid and work print archives looking for family photographs. When she found this work print, she told me how much she liked it. I hadn't seen it in a long time, and I never made a finished print of it. When she pointed it out to, I immediately thought of the Bruce Davidson photograph of the young girl fixing her hair in front of a cigarette machine with a mirror at Coney Island.
I made this photograph on my wedding day. That's my intended getting ready, applying mascara; and she just had her hair done in a style I've never seen the likes of since. I especially like the way the frame is divided in half by the back of her head. That's my grandfather's old Rollei which was my point-in-shoot camera at the time. When I went to scan the negative the other day, I found that it had suffered some serious deterioration including some kind of fungus yuck growing on a part of it. I'm lucky enough to have a Creo IQ3smart scanner which also has an oil mounting station. Simply put, through an oil mounted scan of the negative most of the yuck was minimized, and it required very little photoshopping. But, even so, the color is still out of wack, snd there is huge grain/noise in the shadow areas. For me, that's not a liability with this image: it gives it an old school quality. It's as if we could have been a couple of the kids in Davidson's photograph, now all grown up, about ready to get married.
Women's Big Phat Beach Holiday
Several years ago, I was passing through Valencia during the America's Cup Races. The weather had been kind of iffy for a couple of days. As I was walking down the main beach in the city, I came across this crew. Clearly they ignored that the fact there was no sun, and with little prospect of it appearing any time soon. They were on holiday, and by God they were going to get their money's worth, sun or no sun.I love the random symmetry of the way the women are laid out on their lounge chairs, and the sky and light behind them are incredible.
Phat Doors
Even back when I was thinking about the design and content of my photoblog, I considered having a nav tab for my photographs of doors. Of course, I'm not the first photographer to have a portfolio of doors. But, I've been making images of doors throughout my photographic career. Over the past several years, I've laid out a photography book just of my door images. (In fact I have several other books designed: more about that in another post.) I tend to make collections of images and put them into bodies of work. Doors are an example. I also have bodies of work about bicycles, locks on doors, chairs and seats, dogs, cemeteries and airport interiors to name a few.
But doors: there is something intrinsically fascinating about doors. Obviously, almost every structure has some. They are what secures entrance to a structure as well as invites passage inside. Some are incredible designs in a myriad of materials, others are beads hanging to keep out flies. Once, when I was in India, I came across an incredulous as well as very happy Indian gentleman who had just sold his house's ancient, weather beaten front door for two thousand US dollars to an American interior designer. (Needless to say, he was looking around for some more doors and potential customers.)
The images of the doors below are from a spread from my book about doors. There is a thirteen year time span between the image on the left and the one on the right. Even when I saw the dog sitting in front of the red door, I was drawn to the red pedal in front of him/her. What are the chances of the pedal's color being the same as the door? In the frame before the one on the right page, I wasn't quite as tight on the facade and I was taking a picture of my wife, and just as I pressed the shutter release, this rasta dude with a mountain of dreadlocks and big spliff between his fingers strolled around the corner in front of the building. The image is a great one: the rasta dude with a big smile on his face and Rosaria looking over her shoulder with a WTF expression on her face. I love making photographs.
Parisian Winter Cityscape
For you with little or no experience with Paris in the winter time, understand how far north it is compared to, say, New York City. It gets dark real early in December and January. Also, it's gray and rainy a lot. I use to spend a lot of time in Paris back in the day. Some of the images that I made there still stand the test of time for me. Back them, my only color options were 35mm negatives or transparencies. Although I was making medium format black & white negatives, I never used 2 1/4 color film. It didn't have a darkroom where I could make C prints, and for me at the time, having color labs make color prints for me was beyond my financial reach. In the past several years, I've gone through all my 35mm transparencies, and I've scanned a bunch of them. It's also a little strange because as I've mentioned in other posts, the square frame of 2 1/4 has always been my first choice, followed by 4x5 or 8x10 rectangles. Having started to use a fx Nikon DSLR, I'm back to the 35mm rectangle.
This was the skyline from my bedroom in Paris during one winter that I spent there. I remember, I made a lot of skyline images, but I've always really like this one, probably because of the way the curtains filter the image. And there something about seeing the weak, insipid winter sunlight in this image that jolts memories of that time, and how I started to make better photographs.
