The Old Venetian Painter and His Enemies

Yesterday I printed this:

Firenze, Ponte Vecchio

August 2012

Silver gelatin print

It took a while to print. I studied the crop for a long time, Also, the sky was completely white in the first print I did, so I burned it in in subsequent prints to give it some texture.

Then I wanted to test some old Kodak paper I got at a rummage sale. It is very cute; it is pre-printed on the back side so it can be mailed as a postcard :

But chances were the paper would not be usable, so I just inserted the old paper in the easel without moving the enlarger head. Since this sheet of paper was smaller than the first one, I ended up with a different crop (notice how it is all off center!):

This accidental crop turned out so much better than the one I had worked on for an hour! This print tells a completely different story than the first one. I had gone to some trouble to crop out the tiny rowboat in the foreground, which turned out to be a great focal point, much better than the lamp-post in the other version!

In fact, it is hard to believe this print is pulled  from the exact same negative. There is something magical about editing and the way in which it turns one scene into another, and sometimes drivel into gold.

(There is a line in Caruso, a song that Lucio Dalla wrote: "Potenza della lirica, .... che un po' di trucco e con la mimica puoi diventare un'altro"/ "Opera is a mighty thing, .. with a bit of makeup and miming you can turn into someone else". Dalla was born in Bologna, Italy, in 1943, and passed away earlier this year, 2012).

Last night I brought the pictures over to my friend's Jim house. The first print, I was going to give to his wife, who likes Italy; and the other print I wanted to discuss with him.

Jim had a lot of plausible explanations of why the second print is better, but the problem, as with much talk about composition, is that they are after the fact explanations: you can explain why a successful picture works, but you cannot prescribe a recipe to create a good picture.

While we were talking about it, I was reminded of a story I heard about Titian. I found the exact quotation this morning (but I remembered it accurately enough last night too): "he used to turn his pictures to the wall and leave them there without looking at them, sometimes for several months. When he wanted to apply his brush again he would exam ine them with the utmost rigor, as if they were his mortal enemies, to see if he could find any faults; and if he discovered anything that did not fully conform to his intentions, he would treat his picture like a good surgeon would his patient."

The story was written down by a Marco Boschini, who heard from Palma il Giovane, who had been an apprentice in Titian's studio. Palma was a good painter in his own right, and it is reasonable to believe he had understood the importance of what Titian was doing. My interpretation is that he had developed a technique to deal with composition: waiting for months to be able to see the picture with fresh eyes, then making an effort to be critical of it, rather than hoping for his work to still look good.

Two thoughts: even to an extraordinary painter like Titian, composition was something that required a work; he knew he could not get it right the first time, every time.
And: time. You have to let months pass. Not an easy thing to accept in our age: ars longa, vita brevis.

Oh, and: ars really meant "craft" in latin, not art. The craft takes time.

Coming tomorrow: Jim had an idea, and he gave me a gift.

P.S: I found a datasheet for my old paper. It is dated 1999, so maybe the paper is less ancient than it feels: http://www.kodak.com/global/en/professional/support/techPubs/g8/g8.pdf

Mediterranean

I find that this picture evokes the Southern European light: bright sky, dark Mediterranean pines, never far from the shimmering of the sea. The balustrade suggests the elegance of old seaside resorts.

Technically, this not a great picture. The contrast is bad, and it is not sharp. There are scratches. Yet, this forces the viewer to fill in the missing details, and our brains have no problem doing so; in fact, I think pictures that require us to fill in something engage us more than the ones that don't. If this picture had been sharp and clear, probably it would have no interest.

The picture was taken with a 1930s Autographic Kodak. Since the film rolls that the camera is designed to use are long out of production, I cut a piece of photo paper to size, and put it behind the film gate, which by the way is huge - more than 5 inches wide, putting this "coat pocket" camera (that is what the original marketing materials said) in large format territory by today's standards.
Back home, I developed the paper negative, scanned it, and reversed and toned it on the computer. Paper negatives require long exposures (their sensitivity is roughly equivalent to ISO 4, which means the exposure has to about 30 times longer than for ISO 100 film), and the camera must have moved a little during the exposure.

Interestingly, nothing of the place this picture evokes is real. The picture was taken in Seattle, at a city park not far from the I-90 bridge; the body of water behind the trees is Lake Washington, not the Black Sea, and the trees are Douglas firs, not mediterranean pines.

Homage a Renoir

Garden, Port Townsend (WA)

August 2012

Fuji Instant Film in a pinhole Polaroid camera

 

 

It is exciting to take a picture with a camera you have built yourself (if you are a geek). I bought an old, mold-smelling Polaroid camera on ebay, replaced the lens with a pinhole, and replaced the shutter with a piece of wood that slides down in front of the pinhole (the original shutter could not handle the long exposures required with pinholes).

 

For an entire weekend, I carried my modified Polaroid, tripod and light meter around Port Townsend, and shot about two packs of Polaroid film. None of the pictures were any good. This was the next-to-last sheet of the pack, and I did not bother to put the camera on the tripod. The flowers came out as smudges of color, and I find that the lack of definition and the colors remind me of Renoir.

 

By the way, the picture is upside down; I find it looks better that way, probably because this way the blue flowers are at the top, and blue tends to recede.



Contact Sheet

The developer solution for this contact sheet may have been too cold or too weak, resulting in a wavy pattern all over the sheet. I find that they make this print interesting in a way it would not otherwise have been, though. Please click on it to see a larger version - it is hard to appreciate the small thumbnail on this page.

There is a line of thinking in photography that looks down on this kind of results, because they are unpredictable, unintentional, and not repeatable. There is also an alternative view that considers them more artistic, because they require an ability to see the interesting quality of things as they are, rather than as we want them to be.

For me, I find it is a good exercise to let go of my vision of the end result, and accept the occasional lucky accident. In fact, part of the fascination with old cameras and obsolete processes comes from the lucky accidents they produce.



Contact sheet of a roll of 6x6 photographs

September 2012

 

 

Smith Tower

Three views of the Smith Tower, an high-rise building in Seattle. When it was built, it was the tallest building west of the Mississipi. Now other buildings have surpassed it in size, but not in character. Some day I will have enough pictures from different viewpoints to emulate Hokusai's Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji.

 

 Digital

April 2011

 

Digital

April 2011

 

Positive image from a 4x5 paper negative

September 2012

The Light Don't Wait for No One

Night Market, Hunyuan, Shanxi, China

August 2003

Digital