back
to talking about the everyday. i just read somewhere online about
people doing a negative exchange program, i think that's great. this
is how i got to step it up a notch with my darkroom skills. i used
to print my friends' negs when i was in college, mostly because most
people didn't like to print. it really showed me how much of a final
image photographers have in mind when they hand you over their negs.
it was a great learning period. at first i was just playing for my
own purpose, truly interpreting what i was given, and not always to
my friends' satisfaction. of course, i still do a lot of
interpretive printing today, but at least now i know the questions
to ask before i start, questions such as "what is the image
about?", or "is this a series?", "are you done
with the project, or is this ongoing?, even "can i see some of
your other work?". once i know all that -and more- i can start
thinking about the negative. don't forget, i don't start printing as
soon as i receive a neg, i have a few days -weeks- usually until my
schedule allows me. so, in the meantime, i think, i solve problems in
my head, i visualize many final prints until one feels right. and
the day i face the challenge i'm more relaxed about it. is it a
portrait about hope or depression? got to make the print in context.
i have to convey that message without being obvious. i put myself
behind the camera, in the moment, you might even say role-play. i
morph, become someone else. i try to get the satisfaction of
capturing the moment a photographer gets when the shutter opens and
shuts. i must have a chameleon in my brain. i fulfill -almost- all
my darkroom fantasies. but that comes with a price: i can lose my
own identity from time to time. if i hadn't become a printer i may
have been a psychologist, able to enter someone else's brain and
interpret their thoughts.
sometimes
i draw from my experience as a live interpreter, or from my work as a
literary translator -french|english, last one being a text for anne
senstad venice biennal catalog- or in my everyday life with
portuguese, or when i lived in spain, and went as far as dreaming in
spanish, or when i first learnt english for that matter. all this
helps to put words into images, and hopefully nothing gets lost in
translation. i like to understand different cultures, understand
where people come from, what their words and images really mean.
printing as a career often goes way beyond printing. it's about the
history of printing, and for certain photographer's estates, i have
to understand past styles and points of view. sometimes i can be
like a chameleon traveling through time, or different aesthetics. so
when i talk about making an educated guess on my first exposure, i
mean just that. all that.
looking
back on my last 3 weeks in the darkroom, chasing after my short term
memory, digging into the long term, i do feel lost. in the past 3
weeks i have been successively mitch epstein, elizabeth heyert, bruce
gilden, tseng kwon chi, carrie mae weems, bob gruen, lisa oppenheim,
n. vreeland, len prince and gordon parks. it could be worse as far
as multiple personalities go, but derrida couldn't deconstruct me any
more at this point. this is also why my darkroom needs to be a
fortress of silence, where i can hear myself think and concentrate on
the whole picture so the details don't get in my way. except for the
moments of music during the actual exposing and processing. so for
those who were wondering, this is why i'm a bit anti-social when i
print... to be fair though, i don't think darkroom printers in
general are social butterflies. once the door is closed the whole
world seems to fade away. things move at a different pace in the
dark, and printers spend, well, about 8 hours a day in there, moving
between wet and dry, light on and off... but ask anyone of them:
there's nothing quite like it.
analog writing?