Shooting with film for me in the 20th century and in this one was and is a lonely business tinged with an exciting wonder.

From the first time sometime in early 1961 when I saw an image emerge on a sheet of 8x10 photographic paper in that Mexico City College darkroom on the Toluca highway I have been left with an excitement that has never worn off. The emergence of that image in the developer tray spied by a dim yellow safety light always brought to mind one of the most beautiful words associated with photography. These are the latent image.

The idea that after an exposure on a light sensitive medium be it a Daguerreotype, an albumen print, a wet plate or on celluloid film there is an image there in all of its entirety (for those who are part of the digital age think of a prototype RAW image) that had to be (in the language of the 19^th century) developed out.

Photographic philosophers of the 20^th century like Minor White wrote and talked about the idea of the pre-conceived image. One that you thought of, exposed and then developed to the exact specifications of your initial idea. Other photographers like Ansel Adams considered the resulting negative as a musical score in which the photographer in a darkroom would then interpret.

In my photographic life I have spent countless hours, alone in the darkroom thinking of the above and finding a melancholy of not being able to share that excitement with anybody.

The word latent has also gone through a change in use in this century. But I can only correct this by noting that in Spanish latente when connected to corazón has the wonderful meaning of a latent heart, one that beats.

There are two images here. One is a very sharp 6x7 cm Ektachrome and the other an overly exposed (an error) b+w Kodak Infrared Film. Both images are of the wondrous Lisa Ha who posed for me many times with patience.

The “corrected” over-exposed image underexposes those parts that would be anathema to social media and my blog’s self-censorship.