If you're shooting film and not making proper proof contact sheets, you really should be. I've shot film for more than 40 years but I've only consistently made proper proofs for the past few. For a good while, I shot and developed my film, then scanned it and used the scans to choose and images to print in the darkroom (with the added bonus that I had the scanned images to use online).
A few years back, a Mac OS update made my Epson Perfection V750 scanner the definition of tedium to use...pausing after every single image it scans so that a roll of film can take half an hour or more to scan....
I’ve been collecting Victorian and Edwardian photographs for quite a few years now, but I’ve always shunned the popular colourised images from this era as just a little bit tacky. I had a handful in my collection as curiosities only. Recently, though, I’ve been trying to perfect the art of hand-spotting photographic prints using correcting inks and while playing with the green-shaded olive-tones put some washes on a few of my own reject photos. Then, by chance, a few weeks back I came across a small collection of hand-coloured Edwardian studio images in an East London flea market; my interest...
I’ve said before that my photography is influenced by the earliest purveyors of the medium: the Victorian and Edwardian studio photographers who shot nudes and historical reconstructions to peddle as “artists’ aids”, used as an alternative to life models. For obvious reasons, many of the original buyers had never held a paintbrush in their life! Considered pornographers in their time, the images they produced would today be considered moderate in the extreme. But recreating the look and feel of these photographs is a challenge.
There are many aspects to replicating this early...
It's said that you choose friends that are most like you. Most photographers think of their cameras as their friend. My Mamiya RZ67 is big, ugly and way too heavy, so I can see why I chose it as my day-to-day camera. Since switching from 35mm I use it for pretty much everything, from studio to street. But when I use large format, I switch to a Victorian half-plate Thorton Pickard Korona. My Mamiya PROii was made around 1995, the Thorton Pickard dates to 1895. But what is striking is that looking at the two side-by-side, they are almost identical technologically. One hundred years of advancement...
If you're interested in finding out more about Storyville, the red light district where E J Bellocq took his series of images (see previous post), then read the article I wrote for the latest issue of Whore magazine. It's a really interesting new print magazine with a focus on high quality photography and writing. Issue 3 has only just been released.
Visit the magazine's Website for more info.
New Orleans photographer Ernest J Bellocq has been a major influence on my work. Bellocq was a commercial photographer active in the early part of the 20th Century. The photos featured here are a small selection of images from 89 glass plate negatives found in his apartment after his death in 1949. They are believed to have been taken around 1912 and feature prostitutes from the legalised red light district known as Storyville that operated in New Orleans between 1897 and 1917.
The negatives turned up in Sal Ruiz's antique shop around 1958 and were bought by Larry Borenstein (owner of the art gallery...