Last week on my blog post, I asked if anyone could figure out how I made the photo I shared. What camera, what film what method did I use to create the “stitched” image above. A few intrepid readers got close (Mr. Atkins, in particular.) So, in the interest in full disclosure…I used my iPhone with a swanky app that simulates a bevy of old film cameras. This sharing was an exercise for myself: to see how the method, the process of making a photo impacts how it is perceived by a viewer. I also wanted to challenge my own biases about film vs digital vs iPhone photography. I am working hard this year to NOT GIVE A FUCK about the semantics and the dogma of image making. Do I like the picture? Do others like it? Does it matter? Does it matter how it was made? Do the answers to these questions mean anything to anyone? Probably not. I work hard to create images that do”something.” But that something doesn’t have to be earth shaking, transformative or revolutionary. They could be mundane. They could be entertaining to me and only me. They could be failures…digital ephemera that will float way within a few minutes of being shared. Dust in the wind, so to speak. This transience can be depressing, or it can be liberating. I choose the latter.
2022: 4 Re-visiting old work
Taking a knife to work from decades ago. It has been at turns liberating, frustrating, violent, and ultimately…rewarding.
“Any Day Now” by Elbow
What's got into me
Can't believe myself
Must be someone else
Must beAny day now how's about getting out of this place
Anyways
Got a lot of spare time
Some of my youth and all of my senses on overdriveDon't play Coltrane you will sleep at the wheel
Eyes on horizon
Don't sleep at the wheel
2021: 48 Saul Leiter
I watched “In No Great Hurry: 13 Lessons in Life With Saul Leiter,” by the British filmmaker Tomas Leach this week. It is a wonderful film, at times amusing and at times very sad. The idea that a master photographer can live a quiet life in New York City should be comforting, I suppose. But I also was struck by seeing an aging, lonely Leiter sifting through the detritus of his life, and my heart hurt when I realized that here was a great artist, living…not so much in obscurity, but in anonymity. Saul Leiter, who died in 2013, brought color to a genre that was deeply entrenched in monochrome in the 1950s. His eye gravitated towards subtle abstraction, which I find curious, considering the chaos and complexity of the “real world” on display in the streets of New York. Maybe the fact that Leiter was also a painter has something to do with this.
Those of us deeply immersed in the world of photography probably hold our “heroes” in high regard, and we expect them to perhaps live a life that we might envy. Yet watching Leiter sitting alone, surrounded by his life work, stacked in old film boxes and gathering dust, it made me wonder what becomes of the even less recognized artists out there. What becomes of all the work they (and I) create through their lives? Maybe never destined for a book or a museum show, but instead sitting in piles in an office or studio. What treasures will go undiscovered, or under appreciated?
2021:47 In Purgatory
A quiet, long holiday weekend in the mountains of Colorado. Quiet, cold, some snow. A hot tub and sauna and plenty of attitude adjusters. Purgatory isn’t so bad, when caught between heaven and hell.
2021: 46 Reclaiming Polaroid Negatives
I tinker. I putz. I dabble. I guess I need to keep my mind and my hands busy, otherwise the dark clouds can form. Enough said. I used to shoot quite a bit with my great Polaroid 360 camera. A glass lens, manual focus, Zeiss viewfinder, accordion bellows beast. I was inspired by the work done by Patti Smith, and back in the day, Fuji peel-apart film was cheap (like 10 bucks a box cheap.) Well, take a stroll over to eBay and you know those days are long gone, and Fuji isn’t even making the film anymore. So with a bare film shelf in my fridge, I had to put my 360 to rest.
I did have the forethought to keep the negative backing from some of my peel apart photos. Most folks would throw that part away, keeping only the nicely colored, long-lasting positive image. However, they didn’t realize that there was a salvageable “negative” buried beneath the backing paper and black, chemical coating. You can “reclaim” these negatives with a simple process using cling bleach and warm water. I went down the rabbit hole this week (tinkering, putzing) and reclaimed a bunch of old negatives…some shot over 6 years ago. I figured I’d share the process, in case anyone with deep pockets is still buying and shooting the Fuji dead stock and wants to get more mileage out of the film.
STEP ONE: Grab the left over backing paper from a recently (or not so recently) exposed sheet of Fuji peel-apart film. There are two sides, the one with the matte, black coating is the side you want to work with. Remove excess paper around the edges, if you so desire.
STEP TWO: In a sink, place sheet face down on a flat surface. I used a small developing tray.
STEP THREE: Using toilet cleaner bleach (the kind that is in gel form is really the best way to go, since it doesn’t run all over the place.)
STEP FOUR: let it sit for about 30 secs to a minute.
STEP FIVE: Rinse carefully with water. You’ll see chunks of black goo pulling off the negative. This is what you want to happen. Rinse until no more black chunks are visible, water runs clear.
STEP SIX: Flip the negative over and rinse under warm (to hot) water, gently rubbing the surface with your fingers. try not to scratch, but even if you do, it’ll probably look cool. This step takes off any binding goo, but please note: you do not want to use bleach on this side.
STEP SEVEN: hang to dry
You’ll see a discolored negative image of the original photo, which you can take a photo of (or scan) and then invert in Photoshop, or the app of your choice. Do some adjustments to your liking…and voila! You have a cool, one of a kind, image. Rescued from oblivion, or at least the garbage dump. The fun thing about this process is you end up getting odd color shifts, surface textures, and rough edges that an Instagram dweeb would pee themselves over. I personally really like the look of scratches and emulsion distress.
Give it a try if you have some of this film lying around. In the meantime, I will write an angry crank letter to Fuji Corp. to beg them to manufacture this film again. Maybe if all the analogue folks out there do the same, we can drag these wonderful old cameras out of storage and shoot one of a kind (or two of a kind?) photos once again.
The final image, inverted and tweaked in Photoshop! Check out the janky, amazing frame.
2021:40 Undertow: New zine available now
Excited to share the details of my newest publication with you. Undertow is a photographic meditation on the majesty, immensity and dark power of the ocean. I had the good fortune of shooting extensively on the Atlantic coast this past summer, and I was so pleased with the experience of shooting in the water, that this zine came together quite quickly and very much to my liking. I am happy to offer the zine to you now.
The zine is 30 pages, spiral bound 8.5” x 11 “. The edition is limited to 50 copies, and all are signed and numbered. Cost is $20 plus shipping. I hope you order one today. I am proud of this body of work.
2021: 28 Lomography Film Swap
I like to tell myself that I’d never join a cult, although the matching outfits does have some appeal. The closest I’ve come to this kind groupthink is in improv, and of course, in my passion for film photography. We film heads are niche dwellers, for sure, and there is a particular sect that I’ve grown extra fond of, the good folks who populate the world of Lomography. I’ve been posting my film-based work on my “LomoHome” for quite some time now, and I genuinely appreciate the audience there. In fact, it’s much more than an audience, it really feels like a community.
A few months ago I answered a call for Lomographers interested in taking part in a film swap. The idea is that one person shoots a roll of film, then sends it on to another person to run the same roll through their camera. After processing, magical, serendipitous double exposures are revealed. Of course, the chances of crystal clear, sensical images are next to nil. Instead, the overlapping images create their own unique look. And when you compound this randomness with the fact that the images are from two very different locations…well, that’s when wonders appear.
I was sent a roll of black and white film with a fellow Lomographer from Germany. Their location was a nice foil for the urban desert shots of my southwest US environs. I am pleasantly surprised by the number of “winners” we achieved on this shared roll. But even more satisfying was the opportunity to collaborate with a another like-minded film shooter, especially since our shared roll is part of a larger group of over fifty film shooters.
Enjoy the gallery below and keep an eye out for more to come.
Worth A Thousand Words: Weegee
After over a year of social isolation and staying home, I have recently been feeling the pendulum swing of emotion and desire. Between the desire to get back out into the world (safely vaccinated) and the fear and anxiety of being out around people again. I think I’ve gotten used to my routine of working from home, and the prospect of being part of a large crowd… or even a small one, honestly... is filling me with trepidation. It is in that spirit that I want to take a deep exploration into this historic photograph by the enigma known as Weegee. His real name was Arthur Fellig, but as his self-aggrandizement of adding “The Famous” to his pseudonym was some indication: this was an artist with an ego. Ego was most likely part of what made him a noteworthy photographer in New York of the 1930s – 1950s. Famously shooting at night, and making the crime and violence of the “Big City” his signature subject matter, it is quite the surprise that this particular image above fits into his oeuvre at all. But not only does it fit, it encapsulates so much of New York life in general, and is a perfect vehicle to explore America society in the year before World War II.
Let’s take an overview look at this photograph. It is a summer day, obviously, and the beach is indeed packed. Claustrophobically so, in fact. Coney Island holds a near mythical place in the American mythos, and it perhaps because of this particular image that we have some idea of how it earns that standing. An escape for the masses since the early 20th century, Coney Island was the resort for the “everyman”. While the posh of the past (and present) could afford a retreat to more exclusive resorts, Coney Island was just a subway ticket token away for millions of New Yorkers. This image was created in July of 1940, and if we consider the world, the country, and the city at that time, we came see an overwhelming mass of humanity united in many ways. Also reflective of social and economic stratification that hung over America, as it crawled out of the Great Depression and slowly marched into a world war.
I find it interesting that a huge section of the crowd is actually looking at the camera. I’ve read that Weegee was shouting at the crowd and dancing to get their attention, in order to get large amounts of people to face him for the photograph. I think this adds to the power of the resulting image. You can scan the crowd and examine numerous faces, as opposed to more anonymous bodies engaged in their own personal worlds. We get to study faces, people of all shapes and sizes (but mostly shades of pale skin it should be noted.) Some eyes being shielded by the sun with hands and arms. Some behind sunglasses or the odd hat here and there. Swimsuits of all varieties. Smiles and quizzical looks. Bodies packed in the frame like sardines (a subtitle I’ve seen attached to this image in numerous places.) The crowd stretches off into the distance, completely obscuring the horizon, save for the amusement pier and rides that skirt the upper edge of the frame. The haze (I imagine it as a mix of heat, airborne sweat, pollution and ocean spray) that rides off the right upper edge of the image leads the viewer to believe that there are hundreds more people beyond what we can see.
There are many remarkable things to ponder in this photograph. Through the eyes of a 21st Century, Covid-19 viewer, I find it hard to even image such a scene existing in the present day. Any image that features a crowd of this size (such as looking at pre-pandemic concert or sporting event footage or photos) brings up a gut reaction of anxiety and fear and a general feeling of vulnerability in me. I also think about the actual times that Weegee worked in. In many ways his imagery helped define how collective consciousness accepts what New York looked and felt like back them. The visual of such a working class crowd, overcrowding the easily-accessed beach on a hot, summer afternoon bears a whiff of rose-colored nostalgia, while also making that location seem unpleasant and uninviting to an introvert such as myself. It also speaks to the state of America at that particular time. Slowly emerging from the Great Depression, but economically still hobbled, this kind of day trip getaway was the best that a working class family could hope for. Also in mind, I think about the impending world war brewing on the other side of the Atlantic. The same waters these folks are enjoying in this photo might very well be a future, final resting place for more than a few of them, just a few years later. The innocence presented (at first glance) ultimately gives way to a feeling of darkness to my eyes while I ponder the future of every person who appears within Weegee’s frame. Considering that this photo is now over 80 years old, it is safe to assume that a vast majority of the people in this crowd are now dead and gone. A day of release, of joy, of flirting, of fighting, of drinking and swimming and playing and loving and crying… gone forever but for this photograph.
Weegee went on the be most well-known for his images of crime, murder, fires and such. But what also lurked behind most of his images was the idea that was first presented by earlier photographers such as Lewis Hine and Jacob Riis. We are shown “how the other half lives.” And though Weegee generally showed these lives through a sensationalistic lenses, I still feel a sense of empathy in many of his images. This Coney Island photo is not an indictment of the folks who crowded the beach that day. If anything, it is a celebration of the dignity of the masses, those who made up (and continue to make up) the true fabric and diversity of New York City. The world shown in this 1940 photo might still feel relevant and relatable to many people who might be heading to Coney Island this summer, freed from lock down and isolation, looking for their day in the sun.
footnote: Years later, this image graced the album cover of George Michael, Listen Without Prejudice Vol. 1.
2021: 15 Goodbye, Stranger...
Frequent visitors to this website know that I am far from being a “gear” guy. Most cameras are just a means to an end for me, and I generally swing to the cheaper end of the spectrum when it comes to equipment. Plastic craptastic cameras were a recent obsession; throw in a pinhole camera here, a busted lens there… you get the point. Nevertheless, this week I bit the bullet and upgraded my nicest 35mm film camera. Stimulus money was burning a hole in my pocket, and the premium glass I own needed a long-term body to fully live with. Not gonna get into the details of what I bought… you’ll have to watch this space closely to see if I spill the beans at some point. In order for me to make room on my shelf, I did decide to part with a particular camera that never quite fit into my workflow. My Texas Leica shipped out to a new home this week. I hope it finds a more loving, dedicated user. I never quite took to it, even though I had grandiose plans for it. A cheap plastic Holga stole my heart instead. In any event, as much as I try not to focus to much on gear, it is bittersweet that the Fuji 6 x 9 is heading off to another lover. “Goodbye, stranger…it’s been nice…hope you find your paradise.”
2021: 14 Hey, Lomography!
Short and sweet this week, since I actually just emerged from 5 days in the high desert of West Texas… a HUGE thank you to the great folks at Lomography for a featured article on their website and social media platforms that hits today. A nice deep dive into my latest “destruction” series, featuring (tongue in cheek) easy to follow instructions… so you too can make your own mess. All kidding aside, at numerous times in my life, Lomography films and cameras have inspired and reinvigorated my photography. It is indeed an honor to have my work featured by these film renegades.
Check out the full feature here:
https://www.lomography.com/magazine/346051-5-1-mastering-the-art-of-hand-manipulation-with-nick-tauro