Quite a few years ago I was driving my car to a magazine assignment when I heard on CBC Radio a Beethoven bagatelle. It was so wonderful that I had to stop and listen to it. As soon as I knew which bagatelle it was I called (an early cell phone) a musical director to tell him. His answer was, “Ah, to listen to something for the first time!” I have never forgotten the sense of longing and loss he inflected on that statement.
Of late I am enthused on what I call my scanner-negative-sandwiches without mayonnaise. I have written about it in these links.
My Excitement at the smell of metal
Perfection is a polished collection of errors
What particularly affects me now is that I am looking at negatives I took years ago and scanning them not knowing exactly what that scan sandwich will look like. Will it work? Or will it not?
It is the unpredictability of the result living in a digital 21st century where everything is expected to “automatically” be perfect or as a friend of mine likes to say, “It should work.” For me it usually does not.
I will be 80 this year but this new photographic method of mine reminds me of picking up that lovely box in 1958 at my boarding school PX in Austin that had my new Pentacon-F single lens reflex I had ordered for $100 from Olden Cameras in New York. This was my first really good camera. I kept picking it up and clicking the shutter.
Now I sit in my comfortable oficina with these old negatives and I seem to be seeing them for the first time.
What you see here are two photographs of my Argentine subject Linda Lorenzo posing with a fan and an Argentine mate on the sofa of my Argentine artist friend Nora Patrich.
They dazzle me.
