Category: overnight notes

Free Film

Posted on Posted in A Symbol Life, Getting Stuff, overnight notesLeave a comment

I do love trying different film. But only BW. Just not into color film testing. I spent years doing that; now, sadly there is only Kodak for color negatives. A sad compromise after living with Fuji’s pinnacle of color possibles.

Can you guess that I just returned from a walkabout to find that the film had fucked up. Yep. Well, I had failed to load, to verify the film advancing.

Since I am in new territory I can easily find a roll (120) worth of images in a half hour, so not much time was lost. But I still hate opening the back to find that the counter was only clicking off revolutions, not film frames. The difference between counting and doing. Between theory and practice. Between electrons and atoms.

But then again, that is the meaning of experience. Mechanics fails- human and human made.

Lawson —

Posted on Posted in on photographers, overnight notes, visual mind

She is honest, sincere, forthright. Read her; hear her; watch her.

Arbus, Lawson, lighting

taking a simple approach to picture making: place your emphasis on what is to be pictured. what the camera sees. Get the whole frame exposed equally. Solves several matters: exposure, depth, movement. Everything can be frozen, even using slow films, cumbersome cameras.

This is the lighting solution used with the first color photographers. And as color TV came to the home, the studio lighting was broad, full, and frontal. Shadows and highlights had to be reduced to prevent screen ‘bloom’ — those ghosts across the TV — specters of technology.

We grow; new history comes, but old solutions remain, keeping the past vantage-point. Technology never answers anyone.

Technology carries culture

Reusing, or using a solution from past technology, from a past culture doesn’t overpower that culture; doesn’t revise that history; it renews it; it reasserts it ; it carries it forward. ATV culture; a TV set ; a TV studio built to prevent bloom, by reducing contrast when new color TV sets, new color cameras came into the household, that required an over lit scene. Full frontal lighting. Alive in this century.

If it looks like a passport; it is. If it looks like it was meant to put you in your place; it was.

No one ever freed themself by shaking shackles — that’s a magic act on TV.

https://www.moma.org/interactives/exhibitions/2011/newphotography/deana-lawson/

Deana Lawson
The Many Problems with Deana Lawson’s Photographs
Watch and watch again