I am thrilled to announce that four of my photographs have been acquired by United Airlines for display in their new United Club at the newly opened Concourse E at Dulles International Airport. The four pieces came from my Commuter Diaries series I photographed from 2013-2015 during my daily commute to work and my neighborhood peregrinations on my way home. All four pieces in one way or another reflect movement through time – people and places in a state of flux and transition.
During this time I was carrying my Rolleiflex camera with me and making photos of things I encountered. I was also experimenting with hand-held long exposures in the Metro to capture impressionistic renderings of what motion through time looks like in a photograph. A miniature still movie, if you will. Time rendered two-dimensional.
The two more conventional images are still about motion and time – the man standing at a street corner, suitcase in hand, about to embark on a journey to points as yet unknown. The building is a frozen moment in time – the defunct local hair salon at the street level, the for lease sign upstairs pointing to future transformation. I could not take this photograph today because the building and its environment are almost unrecognizable – the empty lot next door is now a SoulCycle and apartment building, and the hair salon is now a Jeni’s Ice Cream.
The final prints as displayed at the United Club are 48″ x 48″ on metal and framed in deep box-mount frames. I love the way they look in the space – big enough to command attention, but with ample breathing room around them.
As I mentioned previously, I took these images back in 2013-2015. I had scanned them and posted them online at that time, then filed the negatives away. WELL… when I was approached about the acquisition, one of the questions was, “do you have digital files large enough/ of sufficient quality that they can be printed very large?” Full of confidence, I said “YES!”. I had scanned them with my Epson scanner at 2400dpi, which was surely enough to sustain printing them at 48″ x 48″ (the desired size). I duly sent the hi-res scans to the print shop that was going to be producing the final prints. Their response was not a happy one – the image quality was insufficient to print that large.
How could this be? I had scanned them at high resolution with the best technology that was available to me at the time. The source of the problem was that technology – I had used a flatbed scanner, which due to its inherent qualities, produces an effective resolution of around 1000 DPI off of a 2400 DPI scan. All very fine and good for posting 72 DPI JPEG files online, or making 300DPI prints up to 11×14″. I was asked if I could re-scan them.
I had a moment of panic thinking, if I re-scan them, they’ll not be any better. Then I remembered, I now have a Fuji medium format digital camera. I can re-“scan” the negatives with it, and I’ll produce much better quality, cleaner, sharper images. And so I did. BUT… one of the negatives, the image taken at the Dupont Circle Metro station, had gone on walkabout and was nowhere to be found. I never want to be the cause of a problem, but rather a solution, so I took the original image I had posted to my blog, ran down to the Dupont Circle Metro station, and positioned myself right about where I had been when I took the first one using the original image as a guide, and proceeded to re-shoot the lost scene using my Fuji digital camera. Presto changeo, from problem to solution in one evening.
I would not have gotten this opportunity had it not been for ths blog – the art director for the project found my images of DC here on this blog from an internet search. So should you, gentle reader, ever question the value of shouting your work into the void, know that every so often, it does shout back!
A huge thank you to United and Ninedotarts for choosing my work to represent Washington DC.
