Deborah & My Swivel Lens Widelux

Pentax Spotmatic F - Kodak b+w Infrared Film

In getting ready for my show with Nora Patrich at the Vermeer Gallery in Buenos Aires on September 20 and with all of my photographs that will be on the wall now in Argentina I have some lazy days in this waning summer to reflect on my work and to figure out if it has any meaning beyond the fact that it exists. And that it exists in files that I can almost imagine looking behind someone’s shoulder once I am no longer amongst the living.

Today I looked at the photographs of a en English woman called Deborah. Because I met her in Wreck Beach around 1978 nobody ever revealed last names. So Deborah she is. She was particularly proud of her long straight hair.

Kodak Technical Pan Film - Widelux

In those days I was experimenting in as many ways as I could. Some of my photographs, particularly the six above that were taken with Kodak b+w Infrared film. It was particularly difficult to shoot with this film on a sunny beach. The film had to be loaded into a camera in complete darkness and it could not even be taken out of its film canister except in total blackness. At the beach I used a device called a changing bag. It made it possible for doing stuff with film and camera on location that enabled a dark room/closet situation. And a filter, a deep red one had to be slipped in front of the camera lens.

Exposure was 1/125 at f-16 with a 100 ISO setting using a handheld meter and processing the film in Kodak HC-110 in Dilution B.

What these pictures tell me is that in my youth before I found my forte in the portrait I was reluctant to get close. I was in the phase that all photographers go through, “Isn’t it amazing how the human figure can resemble a landscape and particularly when you place it in one?”

I now wonder if I had the opportunity to shoot this all over again if I would do it in the exact same way?

I do know that looking at these photographs and particularly if you check here, there is something to be said for the old-fashioned camera with that swivelling lens as compared to the “modern” digital camera (like my Fuji X-E3) that automatically stitches a panoramic by selecting the frames from a wide angle perspective. Somehow the not swivelling does give a different result.

My guess is that soon to be future project is to shoot a scene both ways.