Tarren

 

I have a friend who often told me when we went to the Commodore Ballroom to see a new British punk band would tell me, “Alex it has been done before.” Sometimes I would show him a photograph I was proud of and he would say the same. One day I caught on and when he said what he always said, I remember shouting, “But I haven’t done it yet!”

And so in our pursuit of art or a facsimile of it we have to copy until we can make the copy our very own.

Sometime at the end of the 20^th century we had a very good photography art gallery called The Exposure Gallery which was on Beatty Street. A young photographer proudly showed me his photographs on the wall and said, “Alex isn’t it interesting how nude bodyscapes resemble Sahara sand dunes?” I was about to utter, “It has been…” but I remembered and said nothing.

In the next few days I will be scanning about 10 medium format (6x7cm) b+w bodyscapes of the most wonderfully woman that ever posed for me for them and for many other photographs. Her name is Tarren and began taking her photographs around 1979.

To shoot proper bodyscapes you need a large studio. Over the wall you suspend a large or medium softbox (with a flash inside) using a boom. The light shoots vertically down. My subject, Tarren was on her side, etc on the floor. I had a dark brown canvas on the floor. You then expose to the highlights and let the rest of the body go dark. In the darkroom you attempted (with mixed results) to bring out some shadow detail. My Epson V700 scanner and my 22 year-old Photoshop 8 do wonders in showing some of that shadow detail.

Because of how standards for showing bodyscapes have changed to the worse and perhaps only viewable in a good art gallery, I am enclosing a couple of face shots that I think are lovely and one more that should pass the "community standards chaps". They are not cropped. I got very close with an extremely sharp 140mm Mamiya RB Lens that has floating elements to keep it sharp at any distance.