Corrie Clark - 1996

To date I have written 6503 blogs (not including this one). It is difficult for me to remember many of them. One advantage that I enjoy about being in Facebook is that for some years now I have been posting my blog links with a photograph every day in that social media platform. Every day they remind me of 8 or 9 of my blog postings with that day’s date years back. I usually check in the evening so I repost them adding comments on how the situation has not changed or it has.

A few days ago I spotted a photograph or American actress Rebecca de Mornay and I tickled my memory. I put her name in my blog search engine and spotted this (link above) blog.

I had forgotten that in 1996 I had photographed a local young actress that looked like her. Corrie Clark was over 20 but looked like a teenager. Her frustration is that in Vancouver she was always casted as that. She told me, “Alex, I long to be made up to look my age.”

The blog in question will attest to just how good a subject she was. At the time I had re-read Lolita so some of my pictures, where I used my psychiatric couch, reflected my effort to make her look like Lolita.

Today when I was looking through her files I found a picture which was a Kodak Kodalith (transparent lith film). In that last century I liked to project my b+w negatives onto lith film and then process it as if it were photographic paper. The result was a large continuos tone b+w transparency. I would then mount it on silver coated cardboard. When these were framed and shown in galleries (with their overhead lighting) these liths looked like Daguerreotypes of the 19^th century.

One of the great limitations of darkroom printing is that not matter how hard you tried it was virtually impossible to bring out the detail in the shadows. In this century a b+w negative, colour negative or slide when properly scanned (I have an Epson V700 flatbed scanner) it will result with plenty of detail in those shadows. My double picture here shows the difference. But alas there is one difference that I miss. In that past century when I used my darkroom enlarger I had a filed negative carrier. No two filed negative carriers could ever look the same. Thus that picture on the left that shows the filed edge proves:

1.The photographer did not crop with the enlarger. The picture was the complete image seen in the camera’s viewfinder.

2. The photographer who took the picture was the person who printed it.