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.
