Saturday, October 03, 2020

Mis fotógrafos contemporáneos,casi tan viejos como yo, se deleitan en fotografiar puestas de sol, eclipses lunares y solares, postes de teléfono, sus perros y sus gatos, esta ciudad en donde viven, con sus pocos rascacielos de noche, y en muchos casos alegan que las fotos las han tomado (sin filtro) con sus teléfonos “smart”. A veces en esos pocos días de sol en nuestra lluviosa ciudad se atreven a fotografiar rosas con sus objetivos macro. Después de varias rosas, para mí, se ven todas iguales.

Me imagino estar obligado a ver en una sala obscura  estas fotos ad infinitum.

Por mi lado no me canso de ver las hermosas caras de las tantas mujeres que me han posado. Ésta se llama Susan y tiene una cara que parece ser de otro siglo. Hay en ella una tristeza romántica (¿Existe ese término?).

Tomé la foto con película  Kodak Plus-X en mi Mamiya RB-67 con un objetivo de 140mm. He escaneado el negativo con una hoja semi-opaca de plástico para suavizar la imagen.

De todos los escritores/poetas latinoamericanos mi favorito en lo que refiere en describir a la mujer, está el uruguayo  Mario Benedetti.

 

¿Y si Dios fuera mujer?

pregunta Juan sin inmutarse,

vaya, vaya si Dios fuera mujer

es posible que agnósticos y ateos

no dijéramos no con la cabeza

y dijéramos sí con las entrañas.

 

Tal vez nos acercáramos a su divina desnudez

para besar sus pies no de bronce,

su pubis no de piedra,

sus pechos no de mármol,

sus labios no de yeso.

 

Si Dios fuera mujer la abrazaríamos

para arrancarla de su lontananza

y no habría que jurar

hasta que la muerte nos separe

ya que sería inmortal por antonomasia

y en vez de transmitirnos SIDA o pánico

nos contagiaría su inmortalidad.

 

Si Dios fuera mujer no se instalaría

lejana en el reino de los cielos,

sino que nos aguardaría en el zaguán del infierno,

con sus brazos no cerrados,

su rosa no de plástico

y su amor no de ángeles.

 

Ay Dios mío, Dios mío

si hasta siempre y desde siempre

fueras una mujer

qué lindo escándalo sería,

qué venturosa, espléndida, imposible,

prodigiosa blasfemia.

Friday, October 02, 2020

Olena, she of the formerly blue hair was born in Ukraine and lived for many years in Colombia. A few years ago she settled down in Vancouver with her Colombian doctor husband. I have been happily doing cooperative photographic projects with her. I thought I had run the gamut. I thought we were “through”.

Olena believes that we must continue, as human beings, to do what we do without concern if it is important to others or not. She told me that I had never photographed her outside in the woods. I mentioned that I had a lack of interest in this as I had started taking figure photography in beaches and in forests in the late 70 and early 80s. I could not possibly do anything new. I was wrong.

 

Summer Interior - Edward Hopper

 

Then I saw Edward Hopper’s Summer Exterior and I was suddenly inspired. I told Olena to bring a sheet. Her husband Alex (a very good amateur photographer) offered to be my assistant.  And so we had a successful session thanks to Edward Hopper and Olena’s prodding.

 

 

 

Thursday, October 01, 2020

Memories haunt me of the many times I have watched the film Laura and detective Mark McPherson (played by the dashing-in-a-trench coat Dana Andrews) and how he falls in love with the woman in the portrait of advertising executive Laura Hunt (played by Gene Tierney) while investigating her murder. One evening he falls asleep to find the murdered woman in the living room.

My Rosemary and I have been married 52 years and our memories are pretty good. In my case I remember most of my boyhood in Buenos Aires (born in 1942, left in 1954). It would seem that my parents were innovators in their idea of educating their only son. They took me to a theater in the round performance of Bertolt Brecht’s Galileo Galilei when I was 8.

And until I left for Mexico in 1954 I saw scads of films that contained my mother’s favourite actors, Dana Andrews, Jean Tierney, Rex Harrison, Katharine Hepburn, Ava Gardner, Spencer Tracy, Dolores del Río, Henry Fonda, Leslie Howard, Humphrey Bogart, Gary Cooper, Kirk Douglas, Burt Lancaster, Frederick March, Orson Welles, Gregory Peck, and Richard Widmark.

How was I to know then that many of the films I saw on movie row in Buenos Aires’s Calle Lavalle were film noirs? Only now would I tell Eddie Muller that one of the finest film noirs has to be John Ford’s 1947 film The Fugitive based on a Graham Green Novel (The Power and the Glory) with Henry Fonda, Dolores del Ría AND that Mexican actor (noir personified)  Pedro Armendáriz and with camera work by the fabulous Gabriel Figueroa as cinematographer.

But there were two films that were dear to my mother’s heart, Laura and The Ghost and Mrs. Muir (Rex Harrison and Gene Tierney). It was in the latter film that as a boy I first discovered that dastardly villain George Sanders.

I have seen The Best Years of Our Lives so many times and every time I see it there is something new that I notice (Teresa Wright is an a late example) that I have come to the conclusion that no matter what anybody can say about Dana Andrews’s drinking problem he is film noir, and principally because nobody can wear that trench coat and a fedora like he does and there is that almost Gregory Peck-taciturn-look on his face. His voice fits the man.

 

 

Once I can remember listening in my car a Beethoven bagatelle so lovely that I parked my car and called the pianist of the Vancouver Symphony to tell her about it. Linda Lee Thomas then said this,”Ah, to hear something for the first time.” 

 

 

I have not seen this Saturday’s (Vancouver at 9PM on TCM) film with the Laura pair, Where the Sidewalk Ends.

Ah to see something for the first time!

In Spring of 1986 I had the luck to be assigned by a Vancouver publication to photograph Vincent Price. I had my camera and lights in a corner during the press conference. He saw me and my lights. He came over and sat down. I told him that one of my favourite films of all time was Laura (he is in it) and another is the Fall of the House of Usher (blood seeped through the walls!). He was gracious and gave me ample time to snap his picture with my big camera.

 

 

 

Wednesday, September 30, 2020

 

Joanne Dahl - Kodak Ektachrome 800 pushed to 1600

The name Joanne Dahl is in my memory as a vague fog that in spite of it all is somehow sharp one. I have no recollection on how I met her.  I do know that I photographed her in 1990 because there are some slides (fast Ektachromes, ISO 800 pushed to 1600) with that year stamped on them. At the time I was obsessed with the idea of pushing Ektachrome do get strange colours and contrast. But I also photographed her with b+w film on a Nikon FM-2 and with my medium format Mamiya RB- 67.

Another reason for the session was to experiment in not using a studio flash. I was to shoot from the hip with my two Nikon FM-2 unhindered by a tripod. But I did use studio lights for the b+w Mamiya photographs.

 

Kodak T-Max 3200 ISO - Nikon FM-2

 There are a few things that to come to mind. To begin with it seems that I wrote about her many times here, here, here, here, here, here and here.

I have written here my firm opinion that shooting with multiple cameras gives me more variety as opposed to previously using motor driven film cameras or doing the same with a modern digital camera.

Most photographers who own digital cameras and particularly those with Fuji cameras have the option of setting their cameras to imitate film. I am not sure this is useful as one may think. If you are a young photographer would you know of the results obtainable by pushing Ektachrome 800 one stop? 

 

 

Three of those slides here would not have been reproduced well as hard copy back in 1990. There were not readily available scanners and the reproduction materials available in photo labs could not bring out shadow detail. The internegatives used to make prints from slides lost a bit on sharpness. The Cibachrome direct from slide printing brought increased contrast and the ultra glossy look for me was a turnoff. The only really good method (no longer in use) was the expensive dye-transfer which was the darling of the advertising industry. In the 30s and 40s photographer Paul Outerbridge pioneered the colour-carbro which for the first time almost accurately displayed the colour of human skin. 

 

Mamiya RB-67 Ilford FP-4

 

So I look at these pictures in this blog and I realize a few things:

1. Joanne Dahl was amazingly beautiful.

2. My attempts at not using a studio flash were not a bad idea and point on what I should be doing now.

3. Film and a good scanner are a good combination. And with a good inkjet printer (I have a Canon Pro1) I can almost not feel a longing for the darkrooms I had or used beginning in 1962.

 

 

Mamiya

Tuesday, September 29, 2020

 

Caitlin Legault - Mamiya RB-67 Polaroid

I own two Mamiya RB-67 medium format film cameras and two very good identical 140mm lenses for them. I also have a third Mamiya.

For years I had the idea of taking portraits in which one camera was shooting the profile while the other the face. The problem then was that there was no way of shooting both cameras at the same time while connected to a studio flash.

 

Fuji X-E1 18 to 55 zoom

 The idea is still in my head but I soon learned a variation. This entailed using more than one camera and, if only with one camera, increase that idea of more than one by using multiple film backs (colour and black and white) on the Mamiya plus shoot a Polaroid.

Variation on a single theme

Of course the resulting photographs were not of the exact moment. But…

I found out that if you put all your birds in one basket and shoot with one camera even if you shoot RAW with your digital no matter if you make variations of that one shot b+w, colour, etc it still is the same one shot.

Mamiya RB-67 colour negative

 

When my Rosemary and I went to Florence and Venice last year I took four cameras. I had two panoramics, the Widelux and the Horizont. This latter Russian version of the Japanese Widelux I loaded with Kodak B+W Infrared Film. I have quite a few rolls in my fridge. This film if left in your luggage will safely pass through repeated X-rays. 

The other two cameras were a Fuji X-E3 and a Fuji X-E1 to which I fitted a Lens Baby. This gave me the potential of a variation of four for any situation I thought worth taking pictures of. I also enjoyed using my Galaxy 5 phone in the art galleries.

As an example of this variety idea I have these three shots of the extremely beautiful Caitlin Legault. One of the photos is a Polaroid b+w for my Mamiya. The second one is colour negative on the Mamiya. The third on what was then my brand new and first digital camera the Fuji X-E1. And I also took b+w photographs with my Mamiya and with a Nikon FM-2

I have two Minolta flash metres. To make stuff a tad more easy I used them both and set one to one ISO and the other to another ISO. But I must remember what ISO is to what camera.