east lyme: pilgrim age

Posted on Posted in art school, book shelf, minimum daily requirement, on photographersTagged , , ,

You know the names of the people, even if you don’t recognize the name of the place. Fellow photographers prompt us. Place probably prompts geographers and letter carriers.
Influence felt and spread. Will you explore for inspiration? What does seeing what they saw provide? I have no answer to either of the questions. I don’t travel to visit places of others. I have never been a pilgrim.

Walker Evans, east lyme… the note idled over a month… for no reason. Okay, one. I considered buying the book. I still haven’t bought it.

Walker Evans lived in this house in East Lyme, Connecticut, from 1967 until shortly before his death in 1975. The house was designed by Evans and his friend Robert Busser, a Yale architecture student. Letters and postcards were often addressed to Old Lyme or Lyme because their Mail truck turned around at Stewart’s Corner, East Lyme.]

Reviewing others’ work provokes a review of mine. Same thing sometimes happens as I edit or revise current work. Few interesting matters ever reach finality.

as test to yourself: Why hold interest in another past place. We don’t see Evans’ time, footprints. A deed with his namespace; perhaps a deposit check could hold as much history– commerce, reverential. Or, is the structure a demonstration of built world a key to His namesake. A keepsake worth travel of two current actors on the artworld.

[Two photographers, James Welling and Mark Ruwedel, just two years apart visited Evans’ home in 2016 and 2018, respectively. This volume places the projects undertaken by both in dialogue, highlighting their similarities and differences.]

[Shooting passersby against a plywood backdrop as they crossed his field of vision from distant right to close left (some noticing him, most not), with the light striking and modeling their features, Evans found that what he was creating with these images was “the physiognomy of a nation.” This book compiles the photographs, contact sheets, small-version printlets, Evans’ annotations to newspaper clippings, drafts for an unpublished text, telegrams and every available print Evans made, along with the Fortune spread as published. Labor Anonymous captures a long-vanished moment in American history, and a crucial project in Evans’ oeuvre.} — here

Welling: (b. 1951)

Ruwedel: (b. Bethlehem, PA 1954)

Everyone loves a secret

Posted on Posted in da net, dye transfer, overnight notes, the fora

They dilute their experience with delay — lots of delay. I love a mystery. Dye Transfer printing was never a secret. Just because you didn’t know, maybe weren’t curious during the age of full supply and support, doesn’t mean it wasn’t there.

Is it better thinking a conspiracy kept you from learning dye transfer, than that you were lazy. How is that you are able to lecture the gathering about the insides of the process? An unlived life, so fully formed.

Some secrets are a fantasy of the person keeping themself ignorant… printing is an experience augmented by theory, not theory spiced with a bit of experience. Don’t read the bathroom wall.

Frog Prince manual: go ahead read it. You will learn a bit about “traffic” of a small commercial lab. Notice that much of the reference matters aren’t included — they are on the wall of the lab. That’s where I’d expect them to be. Mikey’s excitement is that he found a manual from a lab. In 1990, he could have had lab books by the box load. He still wouldn’t have made a print. Kissing toads isn’t the secret to knowledge.

https://www.photrio.com/forum/threads/making-commercial-color-separation-negatives-of-transparencies-for-the-kodak-dye-transfer-process.212574/

Arrogance, particularly absolute arrogance, is a rotten board in the ladder to knowledge. I was tempted to create a login and respond. Nope… this is good enough. Keep it local.

Would you join the board to inform, perhaps hoping to correct? Don’t. They will not appreciate, nor use. M. Gareleick has been under the belief that there exists a secret book, a fountainhead of all knowledge. That lacking this knowledge has kept him from making dye transfers– For some reason Kodak, and the Kabahl of commercial labs maintained these secrets to dominate the marketplace. I suppose this was meant to keep weekenders obliged to order prints from one of the Super Labs.

Ever wonder about all those dye transfer workshops held — passing out worksheets, booklets, quarterly newsletter subscriptions. It is 1980, you could learn to make matrix film… even how to use other sheet film in place of Kodak Matrix film… even for collotype.

Complicating the conspiracy: they shared it among themselves -(and)- they kept it from each other — they used it to make — better (and) worse prints than those who didn’t learn from the exclusive meeting room at Kodak Park. To get in, you had to ask. Most classes were never full.

Reads like the “worst of times, best of times…” of conspiracy novels.

I don’t believe they want to learn Dye Transfer. They want to explain why they failed to learn Dye Transfer when it was a Kodak product.

Along with the “secret knowldge” is the foundation of enlightenment…

a sidebar on inspired knowledge

The better (only) way of growing a small group is in a closed table. Open the gathering to those capable of adding more than they subtract, otherwise intensity is lost.