A Photographic Narrative & an Overdue Library Book Forgotten in a Drawer
In the relative distance from the US (even though here in Vancouver, BC I am about 40 minutes from the US border) and being in another country I watch what is going on down south with horror. Perhaps it is a different one from feeling for Aleppo, but it is horror nonetheless.
My wife and I have been reading (for 18 years!) a daily delivered at the door NY Times. She is more dogged about reading all of it. I am now skipping most of the news about Trump. For me the overdue library book if put in a drawer and firmly closed, will become a memory until the Vancouver Public Library sends me some sort of summons. In fact if the problem is forgotten or ignored it does not exist. And thus, that’s my present treatment of Trump.
At my age of 74 with so many of my friends dying (some are younger) I can almost safely say that I am not long for this world. As a professional magazine photographer I lived in a 20th century era when there was money, we were paid and sent to exotic countries abroad.
My life is not a better one even if I have a Galaxy Smart Phone and my wife and iPhone. It is not better that our new 2017 Chevrolet Cruz warns me when there is traffic ahead. It is actually worse as I will have to copy my CDs and save them into drives that I will have to insert in my now CD player-free car.
In fact I can safely say that Steve Jobs was the villain who ruined the beginning of this century for all of us.
While the above may sound something like a rant, it is but an explanation of why you see this photographic narrative (that’s what I call these five little pictures, two inches wide) which I inserted into a nice gold frame. The frame itself is wider than my scanner so I had to combine two individual scans. I did my best to remove the green/blue cast of the glass. But it will do.
What you see here are tiny giclées done in 2001 before Inkjet printers were improved. Under a loop you can see the little dots of ink (giclée sort of means spray in French). Now the same effect cannot be duplicated because printers have been “improved”.
The originals are 6x7cm b+w negatives which I shot with my Mamiya RB-67 Pro-SD. Film was Kodak Plus X-Pan. I scanned the negatives on my Epson flatbed scanner telling it that the negs were colour negs. The scanner then adds that orange cast. I then play in levels until I almost get a realistic skin tone. And that’s it.
Writing about this stuff takes me away from thinking about that library book/trump in the drawer.
