Work From the Same House

Here is another installment of photographs from Bryan Wolf's remodeling project (the first batch is here). I'm showing a large selection because I think they're really fantastic. I had a chance last week to visit the house in person. I can state with authority that although these photographs look nothing like the house they depict it very accurately.

What To Do? #36

106. Oregon Country Fair, 1999

107. Oregon Country Fair, 2001

108. Oregon Country Fair, 2002

(WTD? is a weekly installment of old unseen b/w photos.)

Signs and Relics

While attending Binh Danh's Daguerreotype workshop last month, I learned a little about his chlorophyll series. Dahn uses the leaves of various plants as printing out material. He places negatives on the leaves --still attached to their living stems-- and exposes them to sun over the course of several days. Dark parts of the negative block the leaf from photosynthesizing, and these cells die and turn light. Light parts of the negative allow light to pass through and keep the cells green. The result is an imprint of the image on the leaf which Danh then archivally fixes in resin.


Listening to Danh describe his process it struck me that you could do the same thing with human skin. By attaching negatives to your arms or legs over the course of many days you could maybe generate an imprint. I tried this with some Diana negatives but the whole thing was problematic. The negatives wouldn't stay in place. They looked funny. Even if I'd succeeded I'd have no way of preserving the images. I gave up.

Then I realized that I didn't need any negative. Every summer I naturally generate records of the objects covering my skin. Here's where my watch sits.


From about May to October, the only shoes I wear are a pair of Chaco sandals. By late summer my feet look something like this:

Chaco Z tan winner, 2007
These marks are fun but fleeting. There is no way to fix them and by December they're gone. But I think they hint at the essential power of photographs. A photograph is an impression of one thing upon another which then becomes a relic of the original thing. Sometimes it is light impressing on film, or it can be a leaf or skin. It's the interaction that later fascinates, the realization that something happened.

My friend Faulkner has this great old couch passed down from his grandmother. The other day I set my camera down on it without thinking. When I picked it up less than an hour later, there was a perfect imprint which we then both scrambled to photograph.



As with the tan-lines this impression was shortlived, gone within a half hour. To make an imprint that will last for ages requires more investment. Take Winogrand's last M4 for example:


The pressure plate shows sprocket marks which were slowly imprinted over the course of thousands of rolls of film. Looking at this image you can't deny something happened! Hundreds of thousands of tiny somethings happened, leaving a visual record more archival than any photograph.

The urge to leave some imprint is a major motivator for many photographers, or for ambitious people in general. We all want to leave some mark behind. We want to fix it as permanently as possible. So we create prints that last 100 or 200 or 300 years or whatever the standard is now. In the end I'm not sure there's much difference between those artifacts and a couch imprint gone in a half hour.

Perhaps the best way to measure the mark of a life is by examining one's tan-lines. If you don't have them you might want to reconsider how alive you are.

Aligns of My Hand

As the husband of one lefthander and the father of another, I find it curious that there are virtually no cameras made for southpaws. I suppose any camera's controls can be learned to use with either hand but they're generally designed for righties.

As far as I can determine, only one camera has ever been designed ergonomically to fit the left hand, the Yashica Samurai half-frame series made in the late 1980s. I may be wrong, and if anyone out there knows of another lefty camera please let me know.

There were two versions of the Samurai, one for righties and one for lefties. Ironically the only product shots I can find show the right-handed version.

Yashica Samurai half-frame SLR
If you think the exterior is bizarre, check out the loading mechanism. It would definitely take a full frame brain to figure this thing out.



See what lefties have to deal with on a daily basis? Thank God I'm a righty with my trusty arsenal of righty cameras. Like this one:



Like most rangefinders, the Leica has controls on the right and viewfinder on the left. The idea is that you put your right eye to the viewfinder while your left eye can watch the scene unfold.

But I've never done it that way. I've always been a left-eyed photographer. I close my right eye, smush my nose against the back of the camera and squint with my left through the little window. My cameras tend to brass up on the back plate where my nose rubs. I'm not sure why I use my left eye, if it connects to the right brain or some other reason. It's just the way I do it. Even if I could use my right eye, I'd have to keep the left one closed. I can't concentrate on two things at once.

Now if only I could find my son a left-handed baseball bat...

Road Trip Journal

Images conceived yesterday on the long drive back from Wild Animal Safari while listening to rightwing talk shows on the only available radio station:

Dick

Dik-dik

Dik-dik diptych

Dick trips

Dick trips diptych

Dik-dik trips triptych

Cryptic dik-dik diptych

Tip dip trick with Dick trips triptych strip

Royal Asshole