Hagia Sophia - Two Views

Despite all its problems, it still is a privilege to be living in this megacity that has few peers from a historical perspective. It is very rich in super-symbolic icons from Islam and Christianity. One of these is the 1600+ years old Hagia Sophia, a Unesco World Heritage Site, which was built as a church, then was converted to a mosque, then a museum, and finally, since a couple of years back, is a mosque again. Being one of those super-symbolic icons, it has been fiercely fought over as to what ideology it should serve. My guess is that the fight ain't over yet.

These are two views from Hagia Sophia, when it was still a museum. One is an interior made from the upper gallery, the other is an outward view from a window on the upper gallery, towards the Blue Mosque - another icon - in the distance. I love harsh mid-day sun for this kind of architecture. I think it defines the form of a curved dome very nicely.

The negs for these photos are from 2007 but the prints are from a few weeks ago. I was going through my negative archive, inspecting them with a loupe (a reversed 50mm lens actually...it does the job), and was struck by the beauty of these two adjacent MF frames. 

Yes, just like a print, negs can be beautiful in their own right. Then I saw that these were Delta400 developed in Perceptol (1+1), a developer I haven't used for ages. Naturally I was curious how they would print. And boy, do they print nicely! The only extra exposure I gave was a bit at the top on both prints; nothing major. The scanner couldn't preserve it, and I'm not too finicky about it either, but there is the tiniest detail in the whites of the upper windows in the interior view.

I also have to add that the optic these negs were made with is amongst the very best I've ever used: a Bronica 65mm f/4 on a Bronica RF645. It's a shame that despite some very nice haptics, the camera is a bit temperamental and not the pinnacle of reliability, but its lenses are absolutely phenomenal. This statement is no hyperbole at all.

The prints are on 24x30cm Ilford Classic paper.

I haven't been to Hagia Sophia since I made these pictures. That's 16 years now. Wow, time does fly. But Istanbul has been so overrun with tourists over the last decade, that every time I passed the church/museum/mosque I saw the endless queues and couldn't muster the determination for another visit.

So, that was it today. Hope it was worth your time. That's the big question, isn't it? Will it be worth my time? Everybody wants our time these days. At least this place is ad free. And by the way, don't bother checking the prices for the Bronica RF645 now! They've become pretty steep. Also, given their track record for reliability, buying one without extensively using and checking it would be a huge risk.

Cheers...and cherish the light!

Reimagining Negatives

One of the better things I've done in my photographic life is to consistently have made contact prints; right from the very first roll. You could say I have a print of every frame I've ever exposed.

Contact sheets might be the best proof that %99 of what we do sucks. Frame after frame it's a hard slap in the face. The vast but unavoidable "waste" to get good pictures is staggering. Yet, they also ruthlessly reveal our shortcomings as photographers, which means they are excellent feedback if we make the effort to listen. We might even see who we really are as a person. "Know thyself" and all that. 

But I want to show something with much less gravitas. You might even find it ridiculous. Anyway...the gold mine they are for new "discoveries", whilst going through my contacts for the thousandth time one day last year, I realized that parts of two consecutive frames could work as one picture. An instance where life took a serendipitous turn; where stars mysteriously aligned. After I made a print of that first "discovery" - the top photo - there was no stopping. All of a sudden, I was frantically going through all my contact sheets with a completely different mindset, trying to see a "bigger picture".

Here I was photographing for a zine where the theme was "Sleep".

All prints on Ilford RC Satin paper.

Needless to say, this is not a novel idea. For example, Gene Smith incorporated part of an adjacent frame into one of his pictures*. Although in that case it wasn't meant to be obvious; he was a journalist after all.

I printed a set of photographs like these and left it at that. Thinking about them now, I feel the end result being completely detached from the photographer's original intent is a problem that can't be simply brushed away. With the word "intent" I mean that which is within the normal photographic frame, i.e. that which the photographer intended to photograph in the first place. So, in the more likely worst case, reframings like these are prone to become a gimmick; but in the best case, I suppose they can become a surrealist's dream.

*Described in an essay by John T. Hill, at the end of the book "W. Eugene Smith - The Camera As Conscience".