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.
Indian Rug Washer
I made several photographic documentaries about oriental rug making in Tibet, Nepal, Pakistan and India. Producing oriental rugs is an extremely labor intensive process. For high quality rugs, the weaving alone can take over a year for one rug: usually the weaving is done in the weaver's home where the loom takes over most of the living space. After the rug is woven, there is a whole process of shearing, washing, blocking, and finishing. Each one of these steps usually takes place at a different location than where the rug was woven.
The image below was made at a rug washing location in Mirzapur, India. For most of my documentary work, I used a Hasselblad; however, I often carried a Graflex Super D with me. It's a 4x5 hand held camera. I had an old Dallmeyer Pentac speed lens mounted on it. It's kind of a one trick pony: it renders extremely soft focus images with amazing bokeh (the swirling highlights).
More examples of my work with my Super D can be viewed by clicking on the "Phatsotfocus" tab.
Sword Phish Club
A couple of years ago, I saw a photographer's portfolio of incredible prints. Naturally, I can't remember his name. What was so interesting about the work was that the prints were platinum prints that had color added to them by means of putting the platinum prints through a large format digital printer. I can't remember how he dealt with the registration issues. What struck me was first the subjects he chose (a lot of grays, blacks), and how intense the printing process must have been. I had already closed my wet process darkroom when I saw these images. But, it immediately occurred to me that tonal separations would be easy to do digitally. So, I started experimenting with images. The image below was from a color negative. After scanning and imaging the file, I duplicated it in photoshop. One version I converted to grayscale and made the necessary exposure adjustments, and then converted it back into RGB. With the other version, still in RGB I selected several of the predominating colors, one at a time, adjusting the saturation and hue and then copying and pasting them as layers into the B&W version. Registering each layer was simple. Once I had all the layers pasted in and registered, I adjusted each layer's opacity.
Waiting For the Parade
It's funny, I've never really considered myself as a street shooter. Some of big names of that genre that immediately come to mind are Lee Friedlander, Ralph Gibson, Henri Cartier-Bresson, and Diane Arbus. Of the four I mentioned, the last one, Arbus, used a medium format Rollieflex, the others used 35mm Leicas. The image below was taken in New York in the 90's with a an old Rollie which had belonged to my grandfather, and that I nickname affectionately after him, Ralph. I took a lot of photographs with Ralph. It was a fixed focal length lens (80mm) camera. In the 70's, when I changed formats from 35mm to 2 1/4, I rarely went back to rectilinear framing. The square format of 2 1/4 just felt so natural and right for me. I used Ralph as my point and shoot camera for along time, finally retiring it for a Hasselblad in 1994.
These guys were part of the Polish Day parade in Manhattan, and the patch one guy's sleeve says Bound Brook, which, as we all know, is in northern New Jersey, just over the George Washington Bridge. I've always loved this image, the way these two guys look, the drum thingie sticking out the one guy's belt. I can imagine these two having been friends and part of a marching band for years.
