mercredi 1 décembre 2004

Photo Art... or Crap? Simple question... simple answer really Yesterday's dour mood didn't last until bedtime... I cleaned a few kitchen shelf surfaces which attract a lot of dust. That's the trouble with burning wood for both heating the kitchen and cooking our food... debris and sawdust fall off the split logs as I bring them in by the armload and fine ash dust drifts invisibly but everywhere when I chuck the logs into the stove and give the grate a good riddle. Feeling slightly more positive after uploading "Time passes me by" and before exercising I shuffled through some boxes of prints to see if anything grabbed my mind for today's weblog... and came across the image above. It is a photograph... or rather was a photograph. It started off as a 16 x 12 inch print... the image being a swanky hairdresser's window located off St. Anne's Square in the centre of Manchester (UK). When I took the original photograph I was interested in the partial overlapping of the interior shapes and reflection of the street scene behind me. The interior of the salon was modern and quite sparse... the exterior more busy as many of Manchester's Victorian buildings well reveal if you look at them above normal eye-level (most people don't look up at older buildings... they'd be very surprised at the amount of detail to the architecture). What happened in the darkroom was not typical... it was bad practice which I admit I do from time to time just to see what happens. Of course "just seeing what happens" is easy to do digitally in Photoshop... all you have to do is try an effect, delete it and try again with another trick or effect. To many, Photoshop is instant gratification... traditional and unconventional darkroom methods take somewhat longer to realise. As in this example... over a week! What actually happened was that I couldn't make the image I had in my head. The composition wasn't right... the shapes were wrong... the contrast was too great... the focal point was split between the foreground lamp and the two high-contrast hairstyle photos mounted within the interior... and I was tired and uncreative. The reject and partially fixed print was dropped into the holding tray filled with water (probably the darkroom waste bin was full that session). After half a dozen prints are made I normally transfer them to a tray with hypo-clearing solution, then a toning bath, then into an archival washer for an hour of washing. On this occasion I didn't because I knew the prints were crap... so they were left in the holding tray (the bad practice I mentioned). This, however, turned the photo image into something else because after a few days in the tray the improperly fixed emulsion layer started to break-up and in places lift away from the surface of the print. After gently lifting the print out of the now gungy water and placing it in another tray, I carefully brushed away small areas of the bubbling emulsion layer... and the silver image it contained. By tilting the tray a tiny amount the remaining blackened silver-contaminated water swirled to the lower part of the print where it was left for a few more days. As this solution dried out the deposit became hardened as you see it now. Certain parts of what was still recognisable of the image were enhanced with black, red and yellow inks applied by brush and Rotring draftsman's pen. Of course images such as this are unique... perhaps for most it would save much time and effort by scanning the basic degraded image and having fun in Photoshop... but for me the artistic process has to be chemical and mechanical and à la main... I can't get enthused by the electrical, or rather digital, side of it. If I do adopt a digital photography regime, as I'm sure I will even if it's only for weblogs, I'll enjoy it to the full for that reason and it's rapid upload after an event. But I do need to keep paints and brushes as part of my artistic armoury. After all, I never studied or was even interested in photography whilst at Art College... I drew, painted, worked in metal, wood and clay, made love, had fun... but I remember after Graduation Day I wished I'd been doing photography. The questions are... did I make the right or wrong choice? And is my photo art or crap? 7:44:51 PM    comment []