I was asked the other day to contribute some images to an exhibit at LOOK3, a photography festival in Charlottesville, Virginia, coming up shortly in June. I decided it was time to troll my negative archives and see what I could find. I came across these images that I had shot probably 15 years ago, maybe more. They were shot on Konica Infrared film, which was rare at the time (they only produced it once or twice a year), and is now defunct. The negatives themselves were pretty dusty, and a couple of them had damage (I was a clumsy darkroom worker when I was younger – what can I say?). Anyway, I thought they were pretty cool, so I scanned them, fixed the flaws, and voila, the results you see below.

The model is an old friend of mine, Jose. Part of the extreme effect you see in the images is due to the fact that he bleached his hair for Halloween, when he threw on some silver shorts, a bit of body glitter and not much else, and then made a big Chinese takeaway box to walk around in that said “Cream of Sum Yung Gai”. That, or maybe “Mi Fook Yu”. It was a clever outfit except for the fact that he could really only wear the box outdoors, it was so clunky. I got him in the studio maybe a week after.

This last one was part of the same shoot, but since the Konica was such slow film (IIRC, it was around ISO 25-50), we decided to play around with movement studies. I think this was about a 2 second exposure. By my current standards of night photography, that’s FAST, but at the time, it was probably the longest shutter speed I’d ever used.

My plan for LOOK3 is to make some digital negatives from these and make platinum prints. Here’s hoping!