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| Itzel |
I have written about the pleasant surprise that a
combination of randomness and unpredictability can be here.
In this 21st century of all things digital there
are a couple of expressions related to photography that have gone extinct.
One of them is, “How did the pictures turn out?” Another can
be, “Did anything come out?”
In that era of film (in spite of the availability of
Polaroid test for those of us who shot commercially) the situation in charge
was called the latency or the latent image. You did not know what was really in
that roll of film until it was processed. I never had anybody at a professional
lab tell me, “Alex there is no charge.” That usually meant that the lab had
messed up and my roll of film was ruined.
Now there is instant availability after one shoots with a
digital camera. But some photographers might point out that on the way home
after a session the storage card in the camera can become corrupt. If that
happens there will be nothing of one’s session.
In my 20th century past I liked to be sure so I
would take double equipment and I would never commit any shoot to one roll. In
my frequent travel assignments when I would return I would have my film
processed in different batches in case the lab had some sort of breakdown.
In the case of the picture you see of Itzel (my friend
Argentine artist Nora Patrich’s daughter) here I found it in my files under Patrich.
I never bothered to make either a contact sheet or a print of this exposure. There were medium format transparencies, b+w film and colour negatives that I was
more interested in. But I must have had a Nikon FM-2 loaded with Kodak b+w
Infrared Film with which I took that one shot.
In this century I still do not attempt to have all my eggs
in one basket. I will use my two digital cameras, a Fuji X-E1 and a Fuji X-E3.
But I will load up my Mamiya with b+w 120 film and use a Nikon FM-2 with some
fast Fuji Colour Film. And of course I still have a few boxes of Fuji Instant
Film, in colour and b+w, that I can use with my Mamiya with its Polaroid back.
That process will, as strange as it seems, increase
randomness and a pleasant capacity for a surprise.