mardi 12 juillet 2005

Images Revisited #2 Self-Portraits When I was clicking cameras as an amateur I used to enter nearly every photo contest published. The competition from other photographers (usually the same names... amongst whom David and Shirley Kilpatrick, Tony Boxall, Joy Thorpe and Raymond Lea should still be well-known to a generation of British enthusiasts) was fierce, and the prizes generally poor, but there was genuine rivalry amongst us as well as admiration at each other's efforts. One of the best photographic training grounds was the weekly assignment in "Photo News" which set a different assignment every week for six months... and to be in with any chance of winning the overall competition one more or less had to enter every week. Each following week the top twenty entrants received points on a scale from 100 down to 25... with a five point bonus if a contact sheet was also sent in to show that you had "worked" on the assignment with perhaps a whole roll of film. The "bonus" was a clever ploy... it encouraged you to do the assignment properly rather than take the best images from your stock files. Although the weekly prize money was two guineas (£2.10 in today's money) for 1st place, one guinea for 2nd and half a guinea (52.5 pence!) for 3rd, the real reward was actually sticking with the contest week after week for 26 weeks... there was nothing else like it at the time... and nothing like it nowadays. The prize Postal Orders popping through the letterbox on a regular basis helped a little towards film and paper costs... but the big one was the camera at the end of six months. I won the overall prize in the Autumn / Winter of 1972 with an overall score of 1,510 out of a possible 2,600 + 130 bonus points... receiving an Asahi Pentax Spotmatic 500 which I immediately traded for another Nikon lens with my local camera dealer in Manchester. Pentax cameras were popular prizes at the time... their promotional slogan was something like, "Just Hold a Pentax," and they used famous photographers including Sam Haskins and Jacques-Henri Lartigue to advertise their products. However, one competition sponsored by them in the old "Photo Techniques" magazine didn't interest me very much... although the sole prize was a superb Pentax LX camera. The problem - and a big turn-off for me - was the exclusive camera's gold plating and lizard skin covering! Ugh! Nevertheless, greed got the better of me and, thinking of the trade-in value of such a collector's piece against another Nikon lens, I put together a set of four prints... my interpretation of the "Sequence" theme being Self-Portraits. This was not a difficult assignment to fulfil... I'd been photographing myself for some time as I found it easier than photographing other people. I'd also been using mainly wide-angle lenses for most of my photography... so it was not difficult to assemble four images for a sequence... submitted as large black-and-white prints (always more eye-catching when the majority of photographers sent in mounted colour slides which were difficult for a judging panel to evaluate)... and all taken with a 20 mm Nikkor lens for more dramatic composition. I've forgotten who won and what their sequence depicted... but I do remember it was a set of mounted colour slides! Humph! My losing entry above shows two images of me 1) in Granada TV's film stock library... the metal Dexion shelving awaiting thousands of reels of movie film whilst I moved slowly past the camera's position for intentional blur against the hard edged structure... and 2) a "headless" self-portrait made by swinging my head in an arc during the 1 second exposure - my dark hair not recording on film although my light shirt did... 3) Naked on the bed - which regular blog readers will have seen before and printed much better as a warm-tone image... and 4) a shadow self-portrait standing on the plinth of one of the column's fronting Manchester[base ']s Central Library. The latter image is of a style I still take frequently... I enjoy disturbing the natural shaft of light between unnatural elements by introducing my own silhouette into the scene. BTW : I didn't sell all hard-won photo hardware... one of the runners-up prizes from "Photo News" was a Ricoh 500G 35 mm compact camera which I still have to this day... after my late mother and father both used it for many years. 9:56:42 PM    comment []