Los Artistas & La Modelo
Thursday, April 10, 2014
“Water, water, everywhere,
And all the boards did
shrink;
Water, water,
everywhere,
Nor any drop to drink.”
Samuel Taylor
Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
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| Linda Lorenzo |
Today’s blog is an ancillary of yesterday's blog
perhaps with a lesser tad of melancholia and alienation. I would like to sort of reverse Coleridge’s
quote from his The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and point out that I have
cameras everywhere, lights everywhere, but not a face to photograph.
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| Los artistas y la modelo |
It is appalling to see how the quality of
photography seems to have diminished in inverse proportion to the
sophistication of the devices used to record the human face. It would seem that
few people understand that a cell phone’s wide angle lens when positioned close
to the face for a selfie will produce a most accurate manifestation of it. Indeed
since your nose is proportionally closer to that lens it will be bigger. And if
you hold that phone high up it will make your forehead (closer to the lens)
that much bigger.
Few of these photographers seem to understand
anything about the “quality” or direction of light. The concept of contrast and
its control, central to the idea of portraiture or garden photography seems to
have gone the way of the clutch.
For today I want to feature a bit of
show-and-tell on the wonders of artistic collaboration particularly when it is
an extended one and routine sets in (a comfortable routine) and work seems to
flow with few words. It all happens automatically in a nice sense.
Sometimes things go wrong but in the right
way. A case in point is some of my work in our first session with Linda Lorenzo
in Juan Manuel Sánchez and Nora Patrich’s home studio. The other Argentine
photographer, Claudia Katz may be discerned in some of the strips of film
holding a video camera. You can see the reflection of her camera’s light on the
studio windows.
What went wrong is that I decided to shoot
some pictures with a Japanese Widelux, swivel lens 35 camera. The camera does
not bark but it is a dog. It has a notoriously unreliable shutter and its lens
is not fast and not all that sharp. For the pictures here I used a very fast,
very grainy Kodak 3200 ISO film. Because the lens swivels to take a 150 degree
panorama I was able to get away with a 1/15 second shutter speed.
But if you do not use this camera
frequently you can forget how to load it. My Widelux, my Russian version of it
a Horizont (it looks like a Buck Rogers ray gun) and a wonderful 120 film German Noblex all have a complex loading procedure.
Somehow I forgot to slip the film under the
roller on the right hand side of the Widelux. This means that you get that
interesting wedge-shaped exposure on the right and since the film is not held
flat that corner is not all that sharp.
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| Nora Patrich & Linda Lorenzo |
I have scanned each strip of three and
combined them all into a digital contact sheet with Photoshop Layers.
Fourteen years later I can still remember
the smell of the paint in the studio, our pre-shoot sessions at the Taf Café on
Granville (around the corner from my studio on Robson. I remember the scalding
mates we all drank (one metal straw, Argentine custom) and just how unearthly
beautiful Linda Lorenzo was (and must still be).
Juan and Nora, separated and live in
opposite sides of Buenos Aires.
Nora re-married a fine neo-Peronist librarian who has an eternal smile on his
face while Juan is glum but still paints (lately draws) his women in his goal
of one day painting one line on a sheet of canvas and stating, “There is Plato’s
essence of womanhood. That is one woman and all women.”
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| Juan Manuel Sánchez above and below, left by Nora Patrich |
This all happens while I brood on how all
my photographic equipment is making the boards, not shrink but bend under their
collective weight.
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| Juan Manuel Sánchez & Linda Lorenzo |
My three panoramics have a lens that
swivels in a semi-circle. The scene focuses on film that is flat but flat on an
equivalent but reversed semi-circle within the camera. Both the Horizont and
the Widelux have to sweep but must do so from an initial standstill. This
causes frequent “stutter” streaks on the film. The much more elaborate German
Noblex, sweeps without taking a picture, and only when the sweep has reached its
correct speed does the shutter open. As you can imagine with digital camera “panoramic
stitching” something that even smart phones can accomplish, my three cameras
are dead and the companies that made them went bankrupt.
And yet I am not sure that the panoramic sweeps
of digital cameras can achieve the quirks mine do when I don’t load them
correctly.
