Vivian and Other Strangers

Sometimes I think about Vivian Maier. Not her posthumously discovered photographic archive, but how she had kept it all to herself throughout her whole life. Decades of serious photography and seemingly no urge to show it to anyone! You might remember Maslow's hierarchy of needs. Self-esteem is right up there in the pyramid. We tend to want the pat on the back. There is a reason for the like button on social media after all. Maybe Vivian thought about her photography in different ways; ways that were completely detached from what we would call "achievement"; the simple love of a picture as a memory for example. Or maybe other forces were at play; maybe she was discouraged by a male dominated milieu. Being a nanny, was there anybody who would've taken her work seriously? It's also a possibility that she just didn't feel like pushing her own work. Without the pushing and promoting nothing tends to happen. The whole thing is a mystery I wish Vivian didn't take to her grave.

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I usually don't stop a person on the street to take their picture, preferring to photograph in the confines of what's available without my interference. But here I was, on the ferry in Istanbul. It was a cold spring day. No matter how cold or wet though, I tend to travel on the upper deck, in open air. The ship was approaching the pier, and the passengers began to make a move, when I saw this young man with his dog tucked into his coat. I didn't think twice, hurried over and asked permission for a photo, which he kindly accepted. "Please, don't bugger this up!" whizzed through my head as I quickly focused the Rollei T (loaded with HP5) and exposed two frames. Thank you, dear stranger!

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I've been using Ilford's cheaper Kentmere range more and more and find both the 100 and 400 speed versions are perfectly fine films. Here are two prints from my last roll of Kentmere 400. It was developed in home-brewed D76 stock solution, together with another roll of the same film. You know what?...if someone had told me these prints were from 100 speed film, I wouldn't have doubted them one moment; the grain is that tight.

The first is a picture I made whilst having a quick and lonely dinner in a local Kadikoy* restaurant. I'd been observing the scene, the comings and goings for a while, then when I thought all looked right, I raised my Leica with 35mm Summicron, focused, waited for eye contact, and exposed one frame. As I lowered the camera the chef ordered the waiter to add the photo to my bill :)

* A district on the Asian side of Istanbul.

After dinner I strolled around in the streets. I've always liked the night-time look of some of the stand-alone cafes by the pier in Kadikoy. They can have a Hopperian air with the neons and the lonely souls. Here, I didn't want to get too close, as I wanted to include the enveloping darkness of the night in the picture. The same camera, same lens, same film, and the same suspense for the "right" moment. 1/30th (or maybe 1/60th) at f2. Man, the Summicron never ceases to amaze me.

Many years ago, I showed my mom some of my pictures. "Why do you take pictures of people you don't know?" she asked. Her question still makes me chuckle today, although I have often asked the same question to myself.

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Finally, let me show you some prints and the Kentmere negs. The prints are on 24x30cm Ilford Classic and slightly selenium toned. It's a bit difficult for me to get even lighting on my viewing board (oh the irony!), so no perfect reproductions here (although I've fiddled around with the file quite a bit to get a decent look), but they should give an idea. They look much better to the naked eye ;-)

BromoFog

I'm glad I didn't throw out the packet of paper when I discovered it was heavily fogged. It was 10 sheets of 30x40cm Ilford MG WT semi-matt, a lovely paper, but apparently this packet had sat far too long. Mulling over whether I should bin it, I eventually thought why not print on it with heavy overexposure and then bleach it back? The bleach should remove the fog, and with it also the overexposure, leaving me with a normal print. At least that was my hope and I'm glad to say I wasn't too far off. Of course, snatching the print from the bleach at just the right moment (like in lith printing) would be critical. As would be the "right" dilution of the bleach. I used the bleach that came with Tetenal's sepia toner kit. If, like me, you prefer a fairly dilute bleach, then what comes with the kit is way more than what's needed for sepia toning.

So I went mad with those ten sheets. Cutting them up, using various negatives etc. Many were destined for the bin, but some looked good. I re-fixed the good ones and even put them through selenium toner just for the heck of it. I had gone this far, I might as well go all the way to the end. Interestingly, all prints have a very strong yellow tint, including the border.

This photo of the volcano Bromo on the island of Java is one of the better prints, if not the best print I was able to make from that fogged paper. The picture is from a month long trip to Indonesia in 2019. Trying not to loose my balance on the thin ridge of volcanic dust (tumble down the wrong direction and you're in serious trouble), I squeezed off several frames, trying to get a good-looking plume within the black abyss. I used a Leica M6 with a Zeiss 28/2.8 lens. The film was FP4+.

By the way, this is a straight colour scan of the print and on my monitor it looks exactly like the print itself. Well done CanoScan 9000 Mark something!

And here is a video of the environs at the same spot. Man, what a stunningly wild and beautiful landscape!

And it's as short as that, fellow photo-nuts. Now we can all go back to watching camera reviews :-P

I used to think of writing a mildly sarcastic rant about youtube camera/lens "reviews". Then I re-discovered Phil Rogers's hilarious blog post about said topic here. That settled it for me; I couldn't have expressed myself nearly as well as Phil. He wrote that in 2015. Blimey, was it so bad even back then?

On the other hand, buried next to all the atrociousness, there is so much wonderful stuff on youtube. Once in a while AI gets smart and recommends me something that I probably couldn't have found myself. For example, take this video about Dutch photographer Krass Clement. A thoughtful and articulate man, who has deeply thought about photography...and my god, his photographs!