Nina Strips

"old soldiers never die; they just fade away."

General Douglas MacArthur

While I am no military man I do share the idea of fading away (like a poorly fixed b+w photograph exposed to lots of sunlight).

For most of my life as a photographer (I began around 1958) I always processed my b+w film archivally which meant that I washed and washed until al remnants of fixer were gone. I did the same with my b+w prints.

I have returned to Mexico many times since I left in 1975 with my wife and two daughters to settle in Vancouver BC. While there I have seen framed portraits that I took so many years ago looking exactly as they did when I handed them to my clients.

What you see here are test strips. B+W photographic (good paper) was always expensive so when you committed an exposure of 8x10 or larger paper under the enlarging lens I made sure the exposure was the correct one. These are test strips of some pictures I took of one of the best women to have ever faced my camera (a multiple times at that) Nina Gouveia.  I went into my files a few days ago and wrote this blog using two of those snaps from the same session. This time around I found that for reasons that escape me I kept the test strips. I scanned them and then I reversed the first scan for a second view. The reason some of the strips are positive and some are negative is that I was projecting my enlarger on Kodalith film in order to make a positive. But I liked the sheen of the satin in a negative form so I also made negative test trips.

One of my tricks in taking photographs of women in my studio was to keep a large box filled with interesting silks and satins. Every once in a while I would go to Dressew here in Vancouver on West Hastings to find the stuff. It was always exciting to go there as invariably I would run into an assorted of beautiful women buying fake leopard material. I knew many of them as they were ecdyisiasts.

I pay in Satin Cash - Emily Dickinson

The lith film tests