Antique Processes, Events, Large Format, Mexico City, Photography, Platinum/Palladium, Travel

Foto Inter/Cambio Recap

April 9, 2024 dcphotoartist Leave a comment

This is long long long overdue, but better late than never. Especially since we are in the throes of planning the next iteration which will be in March of 2025!

Over three days we had five seminars, two photo walks, a Day of the Dead environmental portrait shoot, two hands-on demos, and opening and closing keynote speeches, plus an exhibition of alternative process work at the Museo Archivo De La Fotografía, Mexico City’s official photography archive. Images displayed in the exhibit ranged from salted paper prints made with wet collodion negatives to daguerreotypes of Mexico City to palladium prints to a fine press book with hand-tipped prints. A lot of images were made, and new friendships formed.

I want to first offer my sincerest gratitude to Gabriel Barajas, my business partner in this venture, without whose initial inquiry back in 2018 this would never have happened. He invested a massive amount of energy and time into making this happen here. I also want to thank all the people of the Club Fotografico Centro Historico who helped pull this off- their volunteer efforts from manning the reception desk to shooting video footage to getting us bottled water made the whole thing run. I especially want to call out Veronica Mondragón for her tireless logistics management.

Another thank you goes to all the staff at the Museo Archivo De La Fotografía for their support. They provided us with a venue for our keynote events, and they expanded their offering of gallery space to turn what would have been a modest three-day pop-up show into a major, meaningful exhibition taking over an entire floor of the museum and running for two weeks. They also made me feel like a rock star – I got asked to participate in the ribbon-cutting to open the show, and received a certificate of recognition from the Secretary of Culture for Mexico City for my efforts. They’re also inviting me back to give a platinum/palladium printing workshop some time next year, and a show of my portrait and figure work.

Some photos from the opening night reception at the Museo Archivo de la Fotografia, including the lifetime achievement award being presented to my friend Julio Galindo. As you can see from the last couple of images, we had a standing-room-only crowd. It was quite the evening, and I will never forget it.

I don’t know of a bigger thrill for an artist than to have the director of a museum request you to give them a portfolio review, and then turn around and offer you a show and a workshop (funded by the museum!).

We had three days of activities and presentations. There were two main themes to the conference this year: Daguerreotypes and Book Arts. Carlos Gabriel Vertanessian, an Argentinian photo historian, gave a talk about the history of early photography in Mexico, focusing on the beginnings of the Daguerreotype in Mexico. Takashi Arai and Paty Banda gave a joint presentation (perhaps the most technically challenging presentation to pull off; Takashi was in Japan and calling in at 4AM his time, while Paty was also calling in from another location in Mexico City). They are both 21st century Daguerreotypists and talked about their personal work – Takashi with his interest in nuclear and environmental issues, and Paty with her rephotographic project doing 21st century daguerreotypes that re-created the earliest known photographs of Mexico City.

Matthew Magruder presented his work that spans multiple photographic disciplines; the work he presented centered on book arts and the handmade artists book. Craig Alan Huber (another person to whom I owe a great debt of thanks for his assistance in making this conference happen) gave a contrasting presentation on publishing fine art books, from “trade press” to the extremely limited edition fine-art volumes (usually cased in presentation boxes and accompanied by signed prints, etc). Craig is the owner and publisher of Veritas Editions, an award-winning press that specializes in high-end limited edition books.

We also had presentations by Mary Quin and Arturo Talavera. Mary is an innovative artist from Alabama who began her photographic career working with large format cameras making traditional photographic images and has evolved into making “intuitive” images where she paints and drips photo chemistry onto paper to create images. Mary also gave a hands-on demo to the attendees of her technique. Arturo is a photographer from Mexico City and a master of multiple historic photo processes. Arturo hosted us for a morning in his studio where he demonstrated making a copper-plate photogravure image of the Aztec “Sun Stone” housed in the Anthropology Museum; his original plate from which he created the gravure was a whole plate size Daguerreotype!

Mary Quin showing one of her hearts – work in progress

Our closing night keynote was presented at the Museo Archivo de la Fotografia by Mark and France Scully Osterman, who talked about 19th century spirit photography, an especially timely topic as we were on the cusp of the Day of the Dead weekend in Mexico City. Another resounding success, with a standing room only crowd, Mark and France talked about the origins of spirit photography in the middle 19th century, with the aftermath of the US Civil War being a significant driver of the interest in spiritualism that encouraged the practice. They also talked about the HOW it was done, with techniques ranging from simple long exposures that rendered moving figures in the image as ghostly presences, to advanced methods for manipulation and trickery to give the impression of spiritual manifestations. The evening closed out on the roof of the museum overlooking the Metropolitan Cathedral and the ruins of the Templo Mayor and some celebratory wine was shared by all. The first image is of the wonderful young man who did the live translation for Mark and France’s talk; he did an outstanding job!

All work and no play makes for a dull conference, so we had several photo walks arranged; a daytime trek through the Mercado de San Juan which specializes in exotic cuisine (they have everything from whole turkeys to cockroaches to alligator meat!), a visit to Mexico City’s Chinatown, a nighttime photo walk in the Centro Historico around the Zocalo, and a large format portrait shoot with a model in Day of the Dead makeup and costume (another big thanks to our model and his makeup artist – Rafa Farias and Annie Hernandez).

Day of the Dead decorations at Mercado San Juan

Rafa and Annie getting ready for his shoot, and a few views of the finished results (that’s me with the 5×7 view camera in the last shot):

After the official end of the conference, a bunch of us took the day to go down to Coyoacán and wander around. Lots of Day of the Dead decorations were on display, and a good time was had by all. We grabbed lunch at an outdoor table at Restaurante Ave Maria, who was having a mole festival on the menu – I had a Oaxacan mole over beef which was very rich and delicious. We were serenaded by several strolling musicians – one an older gentleman with a guitar doing traditional Mexican songs, and then a group of young Mexican boys rapping. While their music wasn’t to my taste, they got big props for freestyle ad-libbing a rhyme about the gringo with the camera! I’m still building my street photography skills, especially when it comes to photographing people. As we were heading back to the Metro, I saw this guy with the most incredible style and makeup, and had to take the chance to ask him for a photo. You’ll see the results – he had half his face painted with the calavera, and the other unpainted, and he was decked out in what would certainly qualify as vintage Punk style – he would have fit right in on Kings Road in London in 1983.

Some more Day of the Dead sights:

Photography, Travel

Reading Terminal Market

March 31, 2024 dcphotoartist Leave a comment

Back at New Years I went up to Philadelphia for a short weekend getaway. I stayed at the Marriott in center city, which was across the street from the Reading Terminal Market. The market is a food hall located under the tracks and platforms of the Reading Terminal, a train station that today serves mostly commuter trains. There is some amazing food there – I had lunch one day at a traditional Jewish deli that just absolutely hit the spot with a corned beef sandwich and a cup of chicken soup. Termini Brothers bakery has an outlet there and I brought home four of their raisin scones that were to DIE for (and if you ate them often, possibly to die of – they’re quite rich!). In addition to the prepared foods stalls, there are butchers, fishmongers, and greengrocers stalls as well, providing an oasis of fresh food in the center of a heavily urbanized business district that has seen better days.

“Eat Oysters, Love Longer” – the bar counter at Pearl’s Seafood.

Sushi Umi across the hallway from a handicrafts stall.

Fish on ice at the fishmonger’s.

Martin’s butcher shop – Quality Meats and Sausage. A sign in the background is for live and cooked lobsters. Interesting trivia – lobster was, until the second half of the 19th century, considered poor people’s food. Lobsters used to be so common in the coastal waters of New England that you could just wade into the surf to catch them , and they had little to no market value – so much so that prisoners in New England rioted to demand their ration of lobster be held to no more than three days a week. With the advent of refrigerated rail service, it began to be served in the dining cars of long-distance trains, being able to be transported away from the coasts. It was transformed into a delicacy as they concurrently became more and more scarce as demand rose.

Pastries in the display case at Termini Bros.

The neon sign for Termini Bros counter. They have been in business since 1921, and if their scones are anything to judge by, as long as they keep that standard up, they’ll be around for at least another century!

In case you’re wondering, all these were taken with one of the best, in my opinion, travel cameras available: the Lomo LCA-120. It’s a super-wide (38mm on 120 film, or the equivalent of a 21mm on 35mm/Full Frame). The super-wide angle means you can use it in places you would have a hard time photographing with most other cameras. It is fully automatic exposure – the only control you have over the exposure settings is by changing the ISO on the meter dial. It is, in contrast, manual focus but only via focus zones – you have a selection of four distance ranges you can select via a lever on the side of the lens panel. Because it is a leaf shutter and has no mirror to move, it is quiet when taking photos, so you can work unobtrusively in a busy environment. It does require you to have a somewhat loose shooting style because of that wide angle lens and the fact that you’re composing via an uncoupled viewfinder, not through the lens. While I normally like having the precision of an SLR or a TLR with aperture and shutter controls, working with the LCA 120 is very liberating in a way because you stop worrying about all those fiddly things and just concentrate on composing the image in the viewfinder.

I combine it with Kodak Tri-X film frequently because that gives me enough wiggle room to pull off hand-held exposures with even long-ish exposure times – I’d venture to guess that the shots in Reading Terminal Market were somewhere between 1/15th of a second and 1 second. Yes, you read that right – hand held at up to 1 second.

About Art, Exhibitions, News/Announcements, Photography

Advice to New Artists – Gallery Shows

March 29, 2024 dcphotoartist Leave a comment

For many people, getting a gallery show is the holy grail of their artistic ambitions. Even though the art world is undergoing a major transformation with relationship to brick-and-mortar galleries, many people still see getting a gallery show as a mark of accomplishment (and it is – it means that someone who has money invested in an exhibition space is willing to commit their time, energy, reputation, and cash to showing and marketing YOUR work). Having achieved this, I’d like to pass on some salient advice for anyone still struggling to get there.

HAVE AN IDEA

Before you ever begin to look for a gallery show, have a rock-solid concept about your work. You can take all the pretty pictures in the world, but if you don’t have some idea, some message behind your work, then you probably won’t get very far. I’m not saying that your concept/message must be a social/political/intellectual/academic one, but it should be more than just “they’re all photos of Yosemite because I think it’s pretty”.

ARTICULATE THAT IDEA

Develop your elevator pitch – if you need help writing it, find someone you know who is a good writer to come up with a couple of sentences that encapsulate what your work is about, and then practice delivering it to your friends and family until you are able to rattle it off with confidence.

In my case, it was:

Sinister Idyll: Historical Slavery in the Modern Landscape is a visual narrative of the physical evidence of the slave-holding past in and around the nation’s capital. The work consists of 2 1/4 inch by 4 1/4 inch palladium prints that, by virtue of their size, force the viewer into an uncomfortable intimacy with images that are both familiar and unknown.

That was the hook to pull the interest of the gallerist. After that, I had the attention of the gallery owner, and was able to tell the story of how I got started on my series, what was my motivation, and all the other bits about the work that made it worth showing.

NETWORKING

Go to art openings – lots of them. Go see different galleries and keep track of the kinds of work they show. Get to know other artists and talk to them about their work, especially artists whose work you identify with. Get them to introduce you to the gallery owners – having a personal introduction from someone the gallerist already knows and works with is a big leg up in getting your work in front of them.

GALLERY OWNERS

At the openings, go talk to the gallery owners. Don’t be afraid to identify yourself as another artist looking to show your work, but don’t introduce yourself that way if you’re meeting them cold. Engage them in conversation – ask them about the show, how they chose the work to include, and so on. When they turn to you and ask you about who you are, then tell them, “I’m Bob Jones (or whatever your name is) and I’m a photographer. I’ve been working on a series about xyz for the last three years”. Have your elevator pitch ready to go – if they’re interested, they’ll ask, and you can give them your confident, practiced hook. Have a few images of your work on your phone, at the top of your phone’s gallery, so they’re ready to show, if the gallerist asks to see some. If they don’t, don’t whip out the phone and start showing them anyway.

ETIQUETTE

If the owner is interested, ask what their process for viewing new work is – maybe they have portfolio drop-offs once a month, maybe they schedule appointments, maybe it’s an online process. Whatever it is, FOLLOW THEIR PROCESS. Nothing will piss off a gallery owner more than someone ignoring what they consider to be the most basic of basic rules. They will see it at best as a waste of their time, and you’ll likely never get your work reviewed by them, and there won’t be a second chance.

If they look at your work, and they like it but don’t have a space to show it soon, don’t take this as a no. Say thank you, let them know you appreciated their time, and listen to any advice they might dispense. Get their business card before you leave. When you get home, that same day, or next day at the latest, send them a thank you email, and find out if they would be interested in getting future communication from you about your work. If they say yes, do send them links and announcements about new bodies of work you’re doing. Do it often enough they won’t forget you, but not more than say 3-4 times a year so you aren’t a pest. Don’t send them announcements about every time you get a photo hung in a cafe somewhere, but do let them know if you get a major show or you get a write-up in a serious publication like a national newspaper or art magazine.

SELF-PROMOTION

A lot of this stuff above falls under the umbrella of self-promotion. It’s a practice, not a one-time event. You’ve got to kiss LOTS of frogs to find a prince, so if this doesn’t lead to a solo show the first time you try, don’t give up. Lather, rinse, repeat.

DON’T BE A DIVA

Unless your last name is Mapplethorpe, Avedon, or Liebowitz, you can’t get away with being a diva. So don’t even try. Your goal (I assume) is to get invited back to show again. Producing a show, even a solo show, is a collaborative effort. The gallerist will know their space and have a pretty clear idea of how to hang your work in their space to be most effective. Listen to them. You can politely disagree and discuss their ideas, of course, but don’t take a “my way or the highway” approach to hanging the show. If you pull a stunt and say, “I’m not doing this unless…”, it had better damn well be a hill you want to die on. “Doing that would compromise my artistic vision” is 99% of the time a bullshit excuse. Be willing to share a wall. Be willing to have your pictures arranged in a way you hadn’t thought of. Don’t insist that “if this picture isn’t in the show, I’m not doing the show”. The gallery owner will remember if you’re a temperamental diva, and they won’t want to work with you again. The art gallery world is small – word gets around and if you’re a diva, more doors will close than open.

About Art, Photography

Is Photography Reality? No.

March 29, 2024 dcphotoartist 1 Comment

This was inspired by an online discussion I was engaged in on a photography forum.

Photography occupies a unique niche in the arts. Because of its easy verisimilitude, its capacity to effortlessly record detail with precision, it presents the comfortable illusion that it is reality. I would argue that it is in fact no more reality than painting, and in some ways even less, precisely because of its easy verisimilitude.

PalacioBellasArtesSol — Palacio de Bellas Artes, Mexico City. A seemingly hyper-realistic image.

Object Permanence

Why do I say that photography is less real than painting? Because it claims representational status when it is merely descriptive. When people look at an average photograph, because the subject of the photograph appears to be an exact likeness of the subject, they assume that it is a 1:1 correspondence because it is in their own personal interest to assume such. It is comforting to think that “this photograph IS the person in that moment the photograph was taken”.

In a way it allows us to reverse the childhood lesson of object permanence. When a child is very small, if you show them a toy, then you hide it, they will not understand that the toy is still there, just out of sight. A photograph allows you to imagine that something is there even when you know it is not. The subject of the photograph is not physically present at the moment of viewing the photograph, and may even be dead or transformed beyond recognition, but still exists in the mind of the viewer at the moment of viewing.

Dimensionality

Photographs render their subject from four dimensions (length, depth, height, time) to two. They also perform a selective removal of context. In reality, a subject exists in an omnidirectional, infinite context. Taking a photograph of that subject requires excluding a near-infinite amount of that context – you are viewing that subject from a single direction, from a fixed perspective, as it presents itself for the duration of the exposure. That duration of exposure is necessarily self-limiting and as such is not tied to the experience of the subject holistically – it is possible to make a subject appear dramatically different than it does 99.99% of the time, to the point of being unrecognizable, through the use of light, composition, color, and time.

You are recording that subject in a single quantity and quality of light. And you are photographing it at a single moment in time (even if you are doing a solagraph that requires a year to expose, in the span of infinite time, it is a moment).

Because of the mechanics of making a photograph, while everything that appears in the above photograph was in front of the camera during the exposure, this scene in no way looks like this, ever. Yet it is a photograph. This was made by two separate exposures of twelve minutes each, moving the camera closer to the subject during the second exposure, utilizing a pinhole camera.

Verisimilitude

You are choosing to reproduce that subject using some method that is at best a precise simulacrum of that subject. Should you choose to reproduce the recorded image in any number of alternative media, then you have completely eschewed realism – while a photograph of a house may look like the house, the house has never ever appeared like the palladium print of the house.

The house is NOT that color, nor is it that texture, nor even that exact brightness – it is stone and brick and painted wood, not paper fiber. It is an interpretation by the photographer of the relative brightness of the objects in the scene rendered on a piece of film with its own spectral sensitivities, translated through chemistry onto a piece of paper. That chemistry has its own particular responsiveness to light, temperature, humidity, paper pH, and other factors that alter the appearance of the final image. Yet if you were to take this image and go to the place where it was taken, you would say, yes, this is that house. It is similarly delusional to talk about the permanence of the one versus the other. Both are subject to the vicissitudes of time, and there is no guarantee either one will outlast the other.

Photographs as Language

Let me start this section by prefacing it with a bit of academic theory. While I am thoroughly annoyed by one of the great bete noirs of 20th century academia, post-structuralism or deconstruction, the theory does have one very useful concept at its core: the understanding that language is NOT literal. Words are symbolic, abstract representations of the things they relate to. The word “rock” for example, is a vast generalization about rocks. When we read it, it conjures up in our mind a whole slew of associations with objects of geologic origin, and when YOU hear the word or read the word, the mental image you form is different from the mental image formed in MY head.

I can apply more and more words as modifiers to the word “rock” until you and I can both understand we are referring to the SAME rock (a chunk of granite, three centimeters in length, two in width, 1.3 in height, with reddish brown mottling and flecks of gold-like minerals contained within, whose surfaces have been polished to a mirror-like smoothness, on display in the Smithsonian Natural History Museum’s mineral collection), but even then, those words are NOT the actual rock.

Well, neither is a photograph of that rock. The photograph may represent the rock, and it may represent it with extreme accuracy (the rock in the photograph may be reproduced with the identical dimensions of the actual rock). But it is still two-dimensional, not three, and the colors of the rock in the photograph are composed of organic dyes, not the same minerals and elements of which the rock is composed.

And what of the fact that the photograph can be (re) produced in many different ways so that those aspects of verisimilitude are distorted or thrown out altogether? Perhaps my original capture of the image of the rock is a 1:1 scale representation of the rock, but I enlarge it to be twenty feet across, rather than three centimeters. Or I intentionally (or accidentally) alter the color balance so that the rock appears green rather than red. Or I reproduce it to be smaller than the actual rock. All these things are possible, and true.

If anything, a photograph that attempts to be a literal record represents a failure of the imagination and creativity because it is suppressing those acts through its verisimilitude. An “accurate” photo is encouraging the viewer NOT to think and NOT to interpret, but to take on face value the subject presented because there is the possibility that it might be accurate.

Photographs and Time

One of the great challenges of ascribing literal representation to a photograph is the factor of time in its creation. Because of the speed of production of a photograph, we assume that there is some literal truth and purity to the image. While it is more fundamentally assumed today due to the nature of photographic technology (there are digital cameras today that can record an image in less than 1/10,000th of a second even without the aid of stroboscopic light), even at the dawn of photography when a Daguerreotype could be made in minutes, rather than hours or days for a sketch or a painting, photographs were thought of as “instantaneous”. This can be seen in marketing for early portrait studios: “Instantaneous Likenesses” were the frequent topic of advertising.

But just because a photograph CAN be captured in fractions of a second does not mean that it can ONLY be captured that way, and cannot be ascribed as a fundamental character of a photograph. A pinhole image may be made over hours or days, or a solagraph can be recorded over an entire year. There is nothing literal in a one-year solagraph – it captures the movement of the sun through the scene every day, and the changing position of the sun in that scene every day. The effect on the film or paper is so profound as to not only cause chemical reactions but actual physical reactions – the sun will be sufficiently intense as to burn the film or paper.

If you view that scene where this image was taken, it would look nothing like that, ever. You would NEVER observe that. Yet it is a photograph. It is simultaneously literal and profoundly distorted.

At the moment I’m struggling to come up with a nice tidy academic conclusion to this essay. I don’t know that I have it in me at this time, because I’m not done thinking about this topic and I need to spend a healthy chunk of time organizing and re-organizing my thoughts. I will come back to this idea of the paradoxical simultaneous literalness and non-literalness of photographs and how we interpret them (or fail to interpret them).

Cameras, Large Format Cameras, Lenses, Medium Format Cameras, Photography, Portraits, Studio Photography, Taking Photographs

Portraits of Photographers

March 29, 2024 dcphotoartist Leave a comment

Being a photographer who teaches, I have a lot of friends who are themselves photographers. It gives me lots of opportunities to photograph them, often with their cameras. It can get rather meta-referential, but that’s part of the fun.

This is Mari Calai, one of the members of the Handmade Photography Group at Glen Echo Photoworks. She’s also the current Artist-In-Residence at Photoworks.

Colin Gore waiting around for one of the other photographers in the Handmade group to do his portrait in Wet Plate Collodion. The group did an outing in February to the National Gallery of Art and then brunch afterwards.

Paige Billin-Frye, another group member and fellow instructor – she does amazing hand-colored and toned cyanotype work. It was interesting to see how many of the group members were using small (meaning medium format film or smaller) cameras on that outing. I was the only one shooting 6×7 (my new-to-me Pentax 67) – everyone else was shooting 6×6 square (mostly Rolleiflexes) or 35mm/full frame digital, except Mac who was shooting 5×7 wet plate.

Speaking of, there Mac is in action, shooting his portrait of Mari.

The man, the myth, the legend, not buried under a barkcloth. It was February, it was 45 degrees farenheit, and he was wearing sandals without socks.

Chris Gumm, who coincidentally practices gum bichromate printing, posing with his Rolleiflex.

Switching gears somewhat, Steve Greenberg is another one of the Photoworks people, but not part of the Handmade group. This was from a commissioned portrait sitting we did, this time with my 8×10 Century Master studio portrait camera and the Kodak 405mm Portrait lens.

A different take on Steve, with a different camera and lens – still a soft focus portrait lens, but this time the Pentax 67 120mm soft focus portrait lens. It’s a lens that surprised me – I picked it up because I liked the soft focus effect I was getting on the Kodak Portrait and with some of the smaller soft-focus lenses I have (the Hermagis Eidoscope, a Seneca Whole Plate aka Wollensak Vesta, and my Cooke Series II, which isn’t technically a soft focus lens but has really creamy out-of-focus rendering especially wide open). I wanted to see how good it would be for this effect on a small format. It’s going to stay in my arsenal of lenses, and actually stay in my camera bag unless I KNOW I won’t need it for a particular trip. It requires careful use to get the best out of it – you control the soft focus through the use of the aperture, where wide open is the fuzziest/glowiest, and once you get below f/8, it’s mostly tack sharp. Best used in the studio, where you can control the amount of light you feed it, especially with how relatively fast modern films are.

One parting shot, very meta-referential, as it’s a photographer in a photo studio, showing the fact that it’s a photo studio.

Black and White, Large Format Cameras, Nudes, Photography

Portraits and Nudes

March 29, 2024 dcphotoartist Leave a comment

I had a photoshoot at the end of last year (sorry for the delay in getting these online, but life happens) with a fantastic model, Thomas Roblez. I found him on Instagram. He has a striking, somewhat androgynous look and just radiates sexy beauty. We did a session in my studio entirely with the big Century Master portrait camera and the Kodak 405 Portrait lens. It’s a soft focus lens with a very distinctive signature look, something not easy to replicate even with extensive Photoshop work.

These were an homage to Narcissus. I like the effect of the soft-focus lens on these because it gives them a dreamy, hazy look that you’re not quite sure if it’s real or if it’s something out of the imagination. Very appropriate for the mythological nature of the subject.

This one is a darker psychological exploration. A Plague Doctor emerging from the depths of your psyche – is he here to heal, or to terrify? As we emerge from the unreal nightmare of the three year pandemic, how do we remember those times? They feel like years that didn’t really happen, that went missing, and we’re not sure what to think of them or how to remember them, or even if we can really remember them at all.

Gen Z gonna Gen Z and be on their phone non-stop.

One of his (and my) favorite shots from the photo session. I just love the relaxed, languid pose – it reminds me of those 1920s advertisements.

Not all photos, especially nudes, need to be serious. It’s good to inject some whimsy and humor from time to time.

Not all portraits need be vertical.

Photography

Walking on Broad (Street)

March 28, 2024 dcphotoartist Leave a comment

I went down to Richmond, Virginia over President’s Day weekend back in February to take a mini-vacation. I brought along my then new-to-me Pentax 67 and my trusty Lomo Belair X/6-12. Thank heaven I brought the Lomo along because I managed to get one and a half rolls out of the Pentax before the battery died and the mirror locked up. It’s going to be going off to the repair shop soon. What I did get out of the Pentax was brilliant, and I’ll share those in another post. So I at least had one working camera with me, even if it is a rather specialized one, and I made the best out of the situation and shot an entire trip in panorama mode.

One evening I took the camera out and did some twilight shots – all hand-held, along Broad Street in downtown Richmond. The Lomo is very good for that kind of shooting, and I apparently have hands of steel when it comes to doing slow shutter speeds. The Lomo doesn’t tell you what speed it’s using, but some of these shots were anywhere between 1/15th and 1 second. I tried one or two that went past 1 second but I’m not THAT good.

Broad Street is the main axis street through Richmond – it starts near the Virginia Capitol building and heads west, running for miles out into the Richmond suburbs. These shots were all taken within a few blocks of each other, around the East/West Broad dividing line.

The above image was a happy accident- a triple exposure of the theater building, the bus station, and the window of Tarrant’s, a turn of the 20th century drugstore turned New Southern cuisine restaurant (and the home of my absolute favorite chicken-n-waffles anywhere so far! … well, the Jefferson Hotel in Richmond did them better, but they don’t offer it on their menu any more, BOO HISS…)

West Broad was once the commercial and business heart of Richmond, and like so many urban centers in the second half of the 20th century, it took a downturn. Now it is being revived with art galleries and artists studios, boutique businesses and hotels, and upscale condos and loft apartments. For those who love urban grit, though, there’s plenty of that left if you want it.

Photography

Foto Inter/Cambio and others

October 22, 2023 dcphotoartist Leave a comment

I realize it has been forever since I posted here. So much has been going on, between the pandemic, battling chronic depression, teaching at Photoworks, joining the board of directors at Photoworks, and launching Foto Inter/Cambio, the first large format/alternative process conference in Mexico, not to mention pursuing my own work, I’ve been kind of busy and my blog hasn’t gotten the attention it should. So to start with, the big one!

Foto InterCambio

This was an idea that my business partner, Gabriel Barajas, and I came up with back in 2019. We wanted to organize a conference for large format and alternative process photography to happen in Mexico City. The idea kicked around and just as we were starting to plan it in any degree of seriousness, the pandemic hit. So that got put on hold. In late 2022, Gabriel and I started planning again, once it was clear that the pandemic was abating. We launched our website, https://fotointercambio.com in March of 2023, and that kicked off a year full of planning, organizing, recruiting talent, and lots of advertising on social media. I’m writing this on the eve of the conference, and while it is smaller than I would have liked, nonetheless, that it happened at all is a huge success, and probably the proudest achievement of my life – if you had turned to me when I was 18 and said that in the future I would be organizing an international multilingual photography conference I would have said you were crazy. But 35 years later, here we are.

The short version of the conference description (you can read all about it on the Foto Inter/Cambio website) is three days of presentations, hands-on activities, and community building in the historic center of Mexico City. The conference’s statement of purpose is

Three days of building community and encouraging collaboration through intercultural exchange across the Americas and globally in the large format/alternative process photography family.

I will have more to share after the conference wraps.

Glen Echo Photoworks

I’ve been steadily more involved over the last year and a half at Glen Echo Photoworks. I’ve been teaching more, volunteering to help out with filling in for folks who can’t make it, and lots of logistics, so this month, the executive director and the head of exhibitions extended me an offer to join the board. It is a two-year term, renewable by consent of both parties. I’m very excited to step into this role in arts management – I will be helping out with exhibitions as well as taking on a leadership role in the education committee as we seek to overhaul how we offer classes to better align with student needs and expectations.

Timeless 2023

Timeless 2023 is the second iteration of the exhibition of work by the alternative process/handmade photography group at Photoworks. The initial exhibit was held in 2022 and was a great success. We had the opening reception for Timeless 2023 on Friday the 20th of October, and it was even more successful- over 100 people attended, which is a huge crowd to be in such a small space as Photoworks’ two galleries.

The above images are my work in the exhibit, including the statement print on the left of the second image, positioned at the front door. The portfolio displayed are a series of palladium prints, all taken with an 8×10 studio portrait camera using a Kodak Portrait soft focus lens. I combined two distinct types of images – portraits of people and still life images of objects – to draw parallels between them through the use of the formal stylization.

Foto Inter/Cambio Exhibit

This is the first time in I don’t know how long that I’ve had two shows running at the same time, and certainly the first I’ve had shows going in two different countries at the same time. As part of the Foto Inter/Cambio conference, the Museo Archivo de la Fotografia will be hosting a two-week exhibition of works by the presenters at Foto Inter/Cambio. Works displayed will include images by Julio Galindo the Mexican master photographer (and this year’s honoree), Arturo Talavera, Paty Banda, Mark Osterman and France Scully Osterman (this year’s keynote speakers), Matthew Magruder, Craig Alan Huber, Mary Quin, and yours truly, Scott Davis.

So yes, a LOT has been going on.

Update: I had five images in the exhibit at the Museo Archivo de la Fotografia in Mexico City. All five have found a home in the museum’s permanent collection! I’m very proud of this.

About Art, Classes, Photography, Still Life, Still Life, Studio Photography

Upcoming class – Still Life at Home

February 7, 2021 dcphotoartist 2 Comments

With the ongoing pandemic, many people are turning to, or at least considering, still life as a genre to explore with their photography. This class is designed for those wishing to tackle still life in their own home. One of the great things about still life is that you don’t need a fancy studio with expensive and complicated lights to produce great images, and since your subjects are (usually) things, you can take all the time you need and your subjects won’t complain.

Stainless tea kettle, 5×7 inch Sinar Norma, Cooke 10.4″ Series II Anastigmat

We will cover the basics of how to get set up and choose a space to shoot in, and how to manage your light. All that is required is a table that is within reach of a window, so if that’s all you have, that’s all you need. We will cover lighting options both low-cost and more complex should you not have access to a good window, or you want to be able to shoot regardless of the hour or the weather.

Takeout container for rice, *5×7 inch Sinar Norma, Cooke 10.4″ Series II Anastigmat*

Beginning with single objects and growing from there, we will build complexity into multiple object setups. Most if not all the images used in this article were made with a single light – you can see that you don’t have to be a studio lighting pro to produce excellent results. We will touch on using reflectors and diffusers (very useful when working with natural light where you may not have as much control over the quality, direction and contrast as you do with studio lighting).T

Things with skins, *5×7 inch Sinar Norma, Cooke 10.4″ Series II Anastigmat*

Still life can be more than just a bunch of fruit. It can tell a story, reflect the zeitgeist, or even be a portrait (of the thing pictured, or of a person).

Proof of the Existence of the Outside World #1 – 8×10 inch Palladium print

While in my own work, I do mostly large format film photography, because I like it and I like the results it produces. Between the antique lenses available that produce a unique look to the camera movements to control depth-of-field and plane of focus placement, there is really no better tool for still life.

Using a Sinar 5×7 with movements to shoot a still life of a tea kettle.

That said, you don’t have to use a view camera to produce excellent still life work. What counts is your creativity and understanding of the tool you’re using to produce the image you want to make. Anything in this class is acceptable, from a smartphone to a view camera. As proof of the pudding, the following are images I made on my iPhone:

Bottles for Sparkling Water, iPhone 12 ProMax

The class starts on April 21 and runs for six weeks through May 26. Classes are held via Zoom, from 7:30 to 9:30 pm. The link to the class will be sent to enrolled students via email a few days before the class starts. Tuition is $300 for the six sessions.

To register click: https://www.ssreg.com/glenechopark/classes/classes.asp?courseid=39904&catid=4403

About Art, Classes, philosophy, Photography, Understanding your Practice

Upcoming Class – Understanding Your Practice – The Photo Project

February 7, 2021 dcphotoartist Leave a comment

I have a class coming up from March 4 to April 29, Understanding Your Practice – The Photo Project, at Glen Echo Photoworks. This course is about thinking about how we approach and execute photographic projects. The foundational text for the class is Photo Work: Forty Photographers on Process and Practice., edited by Sasha Wolf. The book consists of interviews with forty different photographers who work in long-term projects, asking each of them the same twelve questions.

We will use the text as a guide to introspection into our own process of working on projects – how we come up with projects, how we shoot those projects, how we decide when they’re done, how we edit those projects, and how we think of them as a body of work – will they be prints on a wall, a book, a website, or some combination thereof.

We will execute our own mini-project over the duration of the class, using the ideas we discuss to help us guide our project and get a better understanding of our own working methods. There are no “right” answers here – this is just an exercise to help bring clarity to your own working techniques, to refine them and hopefully bring success to your ongoing long-term projects (or help you get started on them!).

The images following here are illustrations from my ongoing project about The Day of the Dead in Mexico City. Day of the Dead is a far-reaching cultural institution across not just Mexico but much of Latin America. It has regional and even local variations – Mexico City was, until very recently, somewhat blasé about the event, with celebrations being held more on the personal level. Thanks to the 2015 James Bond film Spectre, Mexico City decided that they needed to have the big public parade (desfile in Spanish) depicted in the film.

The event has its roots in traditions predating the arrival of the Spanish conquistadors, which were co-opted by the Catholic church. Today, the tradition adapts with the times and competes with Halloween (and its Hollywood inspirations), but also serves as a mirror of contemporary cultural and political events.