Trish Nude... Barely
Flip and crop the negative
My wife Trish doesn't like nudity whereas I have no problem with it... she prefered to spend the summer months in the shade adopting the "Pale is interesting" attitude whereas I bared all to feel the warmth of the sun and brush of the breeze on every square inch of my skin.
The last time I photographed Trish naked she was (sort of) happy with the results but wanted me to crop the negative more and more on the pretext of wanting to see what her face looked like in greater detail. Of course I now realise she wanted less of her skinny legs and breasts to be seen!
I used to be the type of photographer who didn't get too close to another person during a photography session... I basically didn't like invading another person's space. I didn't back off too far but in lens focal length terms a standard 50mm was generally too intimate whereas I felt more comfortable using an 85mm or 105mm lens... and a 135mm or 180mm would simply have been too remote. I'm only talking of a few feet subject to shooter distance here but those few feet make a difference.
As a result my early portraits generally benefit from being cropped. Whereas I could never get quite close enough with my camera I now can in the darkroom when making a print - aptly named an enlargement - under the enlarger which has become my tool for overcoming my shyness of others, particularly when they are in a state of undress. I'd probably be more comfortable photographing a dressed woman dressed if I were naked... but that's another story... maybe I'm imagining being in a Helmut Newton scenario!
In these photographs of Trish two darkroom techniques have been used to transform one of the all rather confusing images on the contact sheet (which she hated) to something more classic and discrete (which she likes even two decades after it was taken).
First I flipped the negative in the enlarger so that the image is printed in reverse... this turned her right-to-left gaze into a left-to-right look. Since we read from left to right the effect is more natural.
Secondly only a small portion of the negative has been enlarged. This omitted the untidy swathes of gossamer material (which had been arranged for modesty as much as for decoration) leaving just two hanging drapes to frame the subject.
The side effect of the big enlargement is that the grain of the film is now more obvious giving a soft, but stark, texture pattern to the print... and I think that starkness compliments the nakedness.
The new images are completely different to the original contacts both in appearance and atmosphere. Admittedly they are from two different although to all intents and purposes identical negatives... but they show how it is possible with different enlargement sizes and different printing contrasts to produce a more intimate portrait. I don't know which image I prefer although Trish prefers the less revealing one. Maybe I'll reveal more next time...
9:46:24 PM 
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