A Photograph from an Afghan Refugee Camp in Pakistan
As I mentioned in my last post, I spent some time photographing in the Afghan refugee camps in the northwester territories of Pakistan in the 1990's. At that time, I believe there were nearly seven million displaced Afghans living in Pakistan, many were in refugee camps. Conditions varied from location to location. There were a lot of children running around in the camps who had been fathered by Soviet soldiers in Afghanistan, and then, of course, after the Soviets left, they were abandoned and ostracized along with their mothers.
The image below has always stuck in my mind. The boy's attitude and cockiness is so compelling, especially juxtaposed with the boy next to him: clearly his father wasn't Russian. I've often wondered what became of him. While reading The Kite Runner and The Bookseller of Kabul, this kid constantly popped into my head.
Stadium Spectators in Lahore
Certainly, the current American perception of Pakistan is not a particularly positive one. My experience in Pakistan was largely focused on documenting the making of high quality, hand made oriental rugs. I traveled in the Punjab, in the north, and the northwestern tribal territories. I stayed in Peshawar, I photographed in Afghan refugee camps, I went up the Khyber Pass to the Afghan border.
I was always treated with respect, and in some cases with warm, gracious hospitality. Having said that, there were some places you just didn't want to go as an American in particular and a western in general. I always wanted to travel to the extreme north in Pakistan, up past the Swat Valley, into the Karakorum (think K2 and the Hindu Kush). As it becomes more and more dangerous for Americans to be wandering around in Pakistan, it seems that ambition is on the back burner.
I made the image below one afternoon walking past a stadium in Lahore. As I've mentioned in past posts, I collect images in bodies of work: one of which is images of bicycles. What initially caught my eye were the bicycles with little pennants on the front fenders. Then I saw the white wall and the spectators. I still can't take my eye off the gentleman with the cigarette. I like the way he and the other man look right into my camera, right into my eyes.
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.
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.
Not My Big Phat Swimming Pool
It's August, so it must be pool shooting season...no,no,no...not in some smokey bar room hustling 8 ball. For me, shooting pool is an outdoor event (although this year I shot some indoors, one even in a Manhattan private residence). What I'm talking about is shooting swimming pools, and I've been photographing them for Pools by Jack Anthony for fourteen years. I work directly with Mikie. He's one of four brothers, all involved in the family business. Besides marketing and selling the company's pools, Mikie designs the pools. In the past five or six years, he's gotten really, really good at it. Aided by computer technology, he's able to construct one of a kind, free form vinyl pools; something in the swimming pool parlance that was unimaginable ten years ago. In addition, he designs and constructs high end, gunite pools. My part in all of this is to photograph completed projects, not only for Mike's portfolio, but for his swimming pools' submission in an international awards program as well as a local awards program.
Over fourteen years I've photographed a lot of swimming pools. Up until last year I always used a 4x5 Sinar view camera, usually with a Schneider 58mm XL and a center filter. I'd then scan the transparencies on a Creo scanner, and output digital files and prints. The past two years I have gone over to digital. Now, instead of going out the door with a large camera case, tripod and film bag with dozens of film holders and Polaroid, I hop into Mikie's truck with a small camera bag and a Macbook Pro. My, my how times have changed. I still miss large format film.
This is a gunite, negative edge pool and spa on Shinnecock Bay. The white masonry is imported Italian glass 4 foot by 4 foot tile: the day I photographed this pool, it was nearly a hundred degrees, and the white tiles were cool to the touch. Nice job Mikie.
