Whilst photographer Elif Gülen was going through the belongings of her late father, painter Ercan Gülen, to her amazement she found several bulk rolls of film dating from 1967! That's two years before man walked on the moon. Amongst them were three 1000 ft rolls of Tri-X and one 1000 ft roll of Plus-X.
The atelier we used to meet quivered with excitement when Elif arrived on 11th August 2018 with the worn metal containers. Of course, we all wondered whether the film was still any good and decided to give it a try straight away. Into the darkroom we went, opened one can of Tri-X, felt the film with "oohs" and "aahs" in the darkness, cut off a long strip and spooled it onto a cassette. After quickly shooting through the roll, taking pictures of each other fooling around, the film went straight into developer.
Well, in the video you can see the buzz. Yes, there were images! On no less than 51-year-old film. Then I made this picture, which for me is a summary of that day.
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| Flatbed scan from a Ilford WT FB semi-matt print |
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In the wake of the two devastating earthquakes in Turkey and days of bitter tears, I wanted to write a post about a time when life was still pretty good. Yeah, we all had our own little problems, but looking back - it wasn't that long ago - I see that we were happy, enthusiastic. We were eager to get together. We published zines together. We found joy in our friendship and mutual love for photography. Beginning with the pandemic everybody started to drift apart, physically and psychologically. The economic crisis that followed - exacerbated by utter mismanagement - made life even harder. Here I am today, stunned by the toll of the quakes, at a loss where to look for hope. The political leadership is a disgrace. Institutions are a wreck. And another major earthquake is imminent in Istanbul.
The news of the earthquake was quite shocking. I hope that the government and other institutions can get their acts together. And keep them together should another disaster occur.
ReplyDeleteWell Marcus, I would've thought that they would've been better prepared after the 1999 İzmit quake, and even after the 2012 Van quake. Yet, here we are. Thirtyeight thousand lost lives and counting.
ReplyDeleteHi Omar - that is a very wistful post. Firstly for your group - you never know, things may pull back together.
ReplyDeleteOld Tri-X - just used some from around 30 years ago this week. Stuff is printable on Grade 4.5. A lot of fog though - used HC110, might use R09 next time.
For the earthquake - the world is feeling it - a truly terrible thing, and I think, from what I have read, complicit corruption - truly terrible. I think any government will struggle to recover from it.
Take care of yourself - there is always hope.
P
Hi Phil. That first strip of TriX didn't look too bad. Some fog, yes, but still manageable. But then some of the guys shot more of it, and it quickly became unusable. I myself had one roll which I used for some test shots last year and it turned out almost completely black. Not sure what happened there. I wonder whether opening the seal of the canister and letting in fresh air accelerated the aging process.
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Possibly the density with which it was packed - the 120 from this week was incredibly curly and also the film base was incredibly thin and there's fog everywhere. It does make me think in a cautionary way about very old film stock.
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