I Can See it For You Wholesale

SFMOMA has put together some fantastic photography for the exhibitions celebrating its 75th birthday. I wrote a short piece on one of works by Henry Wessel over at 1/125, but really, there are too many fantastic photographs to list.

Best of all, a lot of the photographers I was most impressed by are folks I had never heard of before. The one that struck me most was a street photograph by John Harding which is the most compelling photographic depiction of race I’ve ever seen. (That wasn’t made by De Carava, anyway.) But there are also fantastic images by Max Yavno, Leon Borensztein, Nata Piaskowski, and John Gutmann. (Apologies if I misspelled any of those.)

I also got to check some things off the big list of stuff I felt dumb for not having seen before. First time seeing Minor White’s photographs in print form. (Not as blown away as I thought I would be — the reproductions in Bunnell’s book are very good) First time seeing Atget’s photoraphs in print form — including a portrait of a prostitute which rather disrupted my notion of what Atget is all about. (Also: have I mentioned how much I love albumen prints? I really love albumen prints.) First time seeing daguerreotypes and tintypes.

I had the Koni-Omega with me (see above). I was shooting with Tri-X at 1600 — a good combination of camera and film, with the strengths of each covering the weaknesses of the other. (The weaknesses being Tri-X’s outrageous grain when pushed and the shallow DOF of 6×7, respectively.) And, of course — as usual — the Koni-O drew interested glances and outright interrogations from the other patrons.

Sorry things have been dead here and, to a lesser extent, over at 1/125. It’s a function of equal parts holiday/family stuff, a metric f****ton of personal errands and whatnot (lots of whatnot), and having a bunch of film I need to get developed and scanned.

When I’ve been shooting it’s been mostly with my Koni-Omega. I sort of neglected it for quite a while there — in the fall I was mostly alternating between the RB67 and the Bessa R. I forgot the joy of working with that beautiful anachronistic monster. I also forgot how hard it is to walk down the street with the Koni-Omega — if I don’t have the camera discreetly in a bag, I get stopped by almost every passer-by to answer questions and receive compliments…

Shooting a lot of film can sometimes make me feel out of sync. Particularly when I’m writing blog posts that have a connection to something happening at a particular time.

It generally takes a fair bit longer for a film photograph to go from exposure to being online than it does for a digital photograph. Of course, it doesn’t have to be that way. With a polaroid back and a film scanner, you can be nearly instantaneous. But generally speaking, some time passes before film is developed, and some more time passes before it gets scanned, and some more time before the scans are post-processed and uploaded.

That’s usually all to the good. A little time passing gives some perspective on things that can be of great value when it comes time to edit. (That’s edit, not post-process.)

It does sometime lead to a certain sense of temporal dislocation, though. I shot this roll of film on a rainy day, and I actually forgot about it. It wound up with a bunch of film that I’d set aside as being not time-sensitive, stuff that I determined I could “get to later.” I forgot about it, and some weeks went by, until I had a roll of film with the same dev time that I had to develop, so I snagged this to put on the other reel in my tank.

It’s funny, because this was shot on whatever the last rainy day was here. Since then, we’ve had sunny days and overcast days, and now we’re coming up on the next round of rain, just as I get these uploaded and posted here — right in time to be vaguely topical again…