The Snapshot - La Instantánea
Friday, March 14, 2014
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| Harvey Lee Oswald |
Multiple events in my life last Sunday
conspired to make it difficult for me to sit at my desk and write as I am
writing now.
Sunday came first with the snipping of the
tip of my middle finger (left hand) with my rose clippers. It has been
difficult to write with only one hand. The bleeding came with an ancillary bad
back that had me not being able to go up or down the stairs of our bedroom. A
respiratory infection, brought about my highfalutin arthritis medicines and
arthritic pain, in spite of my miracle drugs, all kept me out of commission
during the day. Insomnia kept me awake at night.
Relief seems to be almost here as I hunt
and peck with the left hand (the finger, a smaller one now, is healing just
fine).
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| Luján |
This last week I have been thinking about photographs
and as many synonyms of the word as I could. I have enclosed here two scans of
reference to those words as in my Roget’s International Thesaurus – Fourth
Edition (1984). My thesaurus is much too old to include selfie or capture which
are words of this century.
In that last century when I attempted to
parade about town as a an artist who displayed photographs in galleries I
absolutely despised art lingo and what I thought was the pretension of calling
one’s photographs images.
Now with selfie and capture, plus, of
course Instagram, image doesn’t sound so terrible. But I do prefer photograph
and with tongue slightly in cheek I sometimes call myself a scanographer and my
rose scan giclées (another new Word)
scanographs.
Spanish, rich in words
most of the time does not always do justice to the words of my English
vocabulary. I thought there was no equivalent to snapshot or snap but I was
wrong. In Spanish we call such a photograph an instantánea. You get the idea.
When magazine
photography provided me with a comfortable income in the 80s and 90s there was
a constant see-saw between the slick, well exposed photographs and the more
edgy ones of avant-garde fashion world. Fashion art directors liked to use a
word (I loathe it) in this fashion, “I need some edgy photographs with lots of
attitude.” I was never able to figure out what they meant by attitude.
In the several assignments I obtained from the on again and off again Saturday Night I was asked to take pictures like the ones in Vanity Fair or pictures (with no styling or lights) as if I were a fly-on-the-wall.
Many times that snap
look could be achieved with a Polaroid or with the blast of flash on the
camera.
All that, is long gone
and dead. The camera phone and all those devices that capture everything except
perhaps our souls.
There is a new
movement by a younger generation tired of digital perfection. That diffuse glow
is now tarnished. With plastic cameras, plastic lenses, badly expose film and
or re-manufactured Polaroid they are attempting to bring back surprise. That it
can also bring failure is considered an asset.
I would like here to
expose those reading this to a quick little personal story of the snapshot.
For me the first one has
to be the picture of Lee Harvey Oswald. This is a snap. My guess his wife
Marina may have taken it.
Second there is this
picture of yours truly with his father and mother taken in the Argentine
shrine, Nuestra Señora de Luján. I have no idea who took the picture but I am
sure it was one of those box cameras with an uncertain viewer.
The third shot of two
sisters who happen to be twins, I took in the 80s. I was told by the art
director to make it look like a snapshot. I took it in the kitchen; I fully lit
it and used a big camera. It does not look like a snapshot.
Then there is this picture
which I took last week. Is it a snapshot?
Before you decide there are these two photographs which I took with my Fuji X-E1
Lisa, my subject was sitting on the left of the second photograph. On the right hand side there is a Mamiya RB-67 Pro-SD shoting through a Profoto ring flash that I adapted some years ago to be charged by a Norman 200B pack. Not seen in the picture is the fact that my camera lens is swung to one side so that when I took the picture the camera would see the edge of the flash.
Most important, mounted behind the camera is my old Polaroid back. For the snap you see of Lisa I used the-not-quite-yet discontinued Fuji FP-100C Instant Colour Film.
The resulting picture, which I planned with a lot of thought looks like a snapshot. Is it?
