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| Return to Speak Out Menu | GRUMP | Walter Trego | Neophyte | |
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| 84th Issue, September 2002 | |
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| high tech As I hinted I might, I ordered enough "Safe-Stop" concentrate from Artcraft Chemicals to make five gallons of stop bath, and it arrived in a smallish bottle. I won't report on it until I use it. Don't hold your breath, because I still have enough glacial acetic acid to make many gallons of conventional stop bath (I part 28% acetic acid + 20 parts water). So why this item? Because of what came with the bottle, an announcement of John Coffer's Wet Collodion Photography in the Field Workshop. While I'm struggling to print digital scans of b/w photo prints by inkjet, learning its ropes with some difficulty, here comes John Coffer from an opposite comer of the field. This tickles me, though not pink: I do black and white. I can't improve on the announcement, so I'll quote it almost in full, skipping only the dates already past:
John Coffer's "CAMP TINTYPE" Artcraft Chemicals, I should repeat, is at PO Box 583, Schenectady, NY 1230 1, order tel (800) 682-21730, fax (518) 355-8700, e-mail, artcraft@peoplepc.com website, www.artcraftchemicals.com Under "general information" they add the fax number (518) 355-9121. Yousuf Karsh I just heard on the radio that Yousuf Karsh has died at age ninety-something. He was one of very few portrait photographers to become a celebrity, not as big a public figure as if he had howled and played lead guitar for The Obscenities, but big enough for a mild little man of considerable charm. Karsh of Ottawa! Irreplaceable. His great sense of publicity takes all surprise from my telling you, as he told everyone, how he snatched the cigar from Winston Churchill to get the ferocious expression that he wanted-and got-in his portrait of that elephant. When he had photographed enough first-rank public figures with his signature rim lighting drawing bright lines around their profiles, he put them in a book titled Faces of Destiny, BY KARSH OF OTTAWA. The portraits in it were photographic cliches, overdramatized, so the public lapped them up. Sid Grossman was so deeply impressed that he always called Karsh's book "Faces of Dentistry," a fair enough critical evaluation. Karsh was no dummy. He was a professional. F of D got him exactly what he wanted. From that day on, he was the photographer of choice for every smalltime corporate president with dreams of being counted among The Great: fame by association. Karsh of Ottawa gave them all the full rim-light treatment and diplomatically respected every one of them-almost as an equal. They loved it, happily paid for it, and came back for more. Karsh was not only of Ottawa. He had an apartment in New York. Big secret: he was a very nice man, whose spirit, if it watches me type these two little stories, will chuckle benignly. One: He took himself seriously to the point of ceremony. He was supposedly asked by an interviewer: "Now that we are in the space age, if civilization is discovered on Mars, will you go to that planet to photograph its greatest personages?" He is said to have answered, "If that be my destiny." Two: Like other big men in small packages, he had a strong sense of personal dignity and acted it out. Think Bonaparte. This is no "someone said" story, but the report of a witness. One winter day in Manhattan around 1970, Regina (Eggs) Benedict and 1, working together then, went out to lunch, and on Fifth Avenue in midtown we saw Karsh waiting to cross the street. It was snowing hard. He wore a fur coat and a fur hat, and his right hand was stuck in his coat between the buttons, Napoleon style. It was the retreat from Moscow. He didn't see us. We saw him. It made our day. This unique photographer mattered more than his work--the exception that proves (tests) the rule. (You have heard of proving grounds. Tests are made there. Bang! and another catch-proverb bites the dust.) historical consistency department CT Public Radio station WSHU (stands for Sacred Heart University) has a remarkable music program, Sunday Baroque. This year WSHU chose to honor Bastille Day with "Music from the French Court." I sort of expected the Marseillaise and the Carmagnole, but no. I don't suppose it crossed their minds that this was like playing Haydn's nice tune, Deutschland Über Alles, for Veterans' Day, or Dixie to commemorate the Emancipation Proclamation. Still, Rameau, Lully, Couperin and the rest of that bunch wrote good stuff. You don't have to be a monarchist to enjoy it. chant bureaucratique du Fixateur Kodak I'm a little slow. I only just realized that today's true poets write corporate copy- in strict forms set for them by lawyers. This came to me while I mixed a gallon (3.8 litres) of Kodak Fixer from its lyrical yellow envelope. Here is Das Lied von der Fixierbad in Kodak's own words addressed to us multilingual commercial and industrial photographers: Fixer · Fixateur butter side down That solves, "If you drop your toast?" In photo printing, my question is, "Which of my prints will I inadvertently damage in processing and drying?" Lately I've gone through a print-filing frenzy that will never really end. My prints are now stored in semirational order - that is, in the boxes where I'll look for them. While filing, I look at each picture and try to place it sensibly. And I notice that when just one print of a picture is damaged, too often it's the best print. I have a set of five matched prints from one hard-to-print negative. I like the picture and keep trying to print it better. This was my best try yet. So what happened? I don't know. Only these five best prints of it are damaged, and the damage to all five is identical. I suppose the paper was damaged in the box before I printed. The damage isn't conspicuous: I didn't see it until I spotted out dustmarks on one print, saw that it was damaged, and then found matching damage on the other four. Statistic-ally unlikely. Why do no other prints from that box of paper show damage? Unless some do and I just didn't notice, it looks as if there's malevolence, as well as order, which is also not supposed to be there, in my personal brand of chaos. print washers - enough already More questions came in. I have three main things to say about print washers: 1) All washers that hold the prints apart are good. They wash prints well if and when they're used well. 2) Few of the special features advertised with print washers are good for much beyond raising their price. They generally represent technical ignorance, and/or superior salesmanship that transcends mere fact. 3) There are exceptions. The good special feature of the Versalab washer is that it has no special feature. It has all it needs and no more. An intelligent design. The good special feature of the Cascade washer is its one-way flow path. Prints added later at the back of the washer, downstream, won't contaminate prints already in at the front, upstream. This isn't always needed, but can be useful. An intelligent design. For me, these are today's archival print washers of choice. Both advertise in Photo Techniques magazine. photovision: art & technique That's a new magazine. I heard about it late and subscribed experimentally to find out if it's worth reporting on. I'm relieved to say that it is. Perfect, no; good, yes. My first issue, which just came, is vol. 2, no. 6 so it has been around for a while. It features three photographers, very different from each other, all worth close attention: Richard Garrod (big camera, California), Rita Bernstein (format not told, Philadelphia), and Garry Winogrand (Leica, NYC, Texas and all over). In the letters column, two experts, each partly right, argue about the number of emulsions in Ilford Multigrade FB. The first wrote in an article that it has two emulsions, soft (smitive to green light) and hard (blue light). The second wrote in to say, Wrong, there's only one emulsion. He's been there and he knows. Each is right as far as he gets. Re writer 1, The part I know of the whole story is that some time ago it stopped being a trade secret that Multigrade FB has three emulsions, one hard, one soft, one to smooth the paper's curve. The plant manager in Lyon let this slip to some photo editors in 1985 and asked us not to mention it in what we wrote. But eventually, I conjecture, Kodak learned it, so the curves of Polymax Fine Art (embarrassing name) are now as smooth as Ilford's. No more double shoulders. Re writer 2, no doubt he watched the infrared monitor screen as the one coat of emulsion (a mixture of the three emulsions described above) was put on the paper by a block-long machine. Since there's only one coating pass, his notion that there's only one emulsion is natural, though not quite right. Well, there's plenty of incomplete knowledge around (I am enjoying not writing a letter of correction to PV. What admirable restraint, I tell myself, while blabbing it here). The good news is that the well-reproduced photos of the three b/w photographers are good examples of the work of each, and that the magazine is free of criminal vandalism by layout. The technical article is a sound one, though I don't see it as useful to many photographers. If it helps one good one, no justification is called for. We must take our chances with technical refinement, 'which helps some and is misused by others who mistake control for talent. Those will never learn. We can't help them and must learn to let them go their happy way, unhindered by understanding. The bad news is crass, tasteless use of type, and a geometrically messy cover that makes an interesting color photo by Dennis Chin impossible to see. I wish they had given it a chance. It may be good. I can't really decide without covering up the rest of the cover to get rid of the visual noise. When I do that, I feel and hope it's good but I'm still not sure: the horrible cover may have poisoned it. The page layout is clean in some places and cluttered in others. I hope they will learn to clean up the cover and all the picture pages to let every photo they print live. (It's not difficult: please try.) The magazine has a semi-hysterical anti-digital bias but carries digital ads. That prejudice is OK, and so is their need to get every ad they can to pay the printer. It's just that if you're looking for good digital photo information, you won't find it in Photovision. The magazine goes into limited mourning because Kodak is discontinuing Verichrome Pan, which it much prefers to Plus-X. Everyone to his own gout, as Mike Kinzer of Pop Photo used to say. We should distinguish between facts and our preferences-not always easy, but it can be useful. I am left unmoved by the end of VP, though if I had to choose between those films (both too slow for me) I'd pick PX, with which I had some luck long ago. It was slower than Kodak said, and the development they recommended for it was grotesquely overcontrasty, but when exposed and developed to be printable, Plus-X was not bad. I don't know what it's like now. That was forty years ago. Tempus whizzit. The bad news is crass, tasteless use of type, and a geometrically messy cover I think PV is good and deserves support. They take Visa and Mastercard. If you subscribe from the USA, send $26.95 for one year (US$39.95 Canada & Mexico, USS49.95 other countries) to Hast Publishing Co., PO Box 845,Crestone, CO 9113 1; phone (719) 256-5099; fax (719) 256-4167; pvsubs@fone.net, and www.photovisiommagazine.com generic photo critic There are name-brand prescription drugs and generic ones that do the same thing but cost less. There are also interchangeable name-brand photo critics, but not, until today, cheap generic ones. I must admit that I have the advantage of hardly ever reading our standard-issue critics, but their interchangeability is assured by what's quoted from them, and even by their names. (Their first names or eemyas both end with the affectionate diminutive "ee," and their last names or fameelyas both begin with "G" and end with "berg.") Clearly they are identical tweens. On this solid concrete foundation I have built the first cheap generic photo critic. All that remains is to bring the creature to life. Throw the switch, Igor! Now raise the curtain! It is my privilege to present to you tonight the one and the only Cindy! Glumberg! (standing ovation). chemical problem Gerhart Brinkmann found it in the journal, Precious Metals News. An Idaho highschool student won first prize at a science fair for his bulletin on dihydrogen monoxide. He called for strict control of this chemical and gave the following facts about it: "1. It can cause excessive sweating and vomiting. 2. It is a major component in acid rain. 3. It can cause severe bums in its gaseous state. 4. Accidental inhalation can kill you. 5. It contributes to erosion. 6. It decreases the effectiveness of automobile brakes. 7. It has been found in tumors of terminal cancer patients. "He asked 50 people if they supported a ban of the chemical. Forty-three said yes, six were undecided, and only one knew that the chemical was water." Here is a doggerel verse from my childhood: Our little Willie died last night.(With which you don't want to mess: sulfuric acid.) Mr. Brinkmann remembers the air raids that destroyed Dresden in WWII: "After bombing Dresden, the Allied bombers flew out west over my hometown, far from Dresden. We had no idea what was going on. As we sat in ou'r bomb shelters they flew over that night solidly for two hours or more. We thought our end had arrived. "Not so, as there was only one drop of five bombs, which hit the house and garden where my grandparents stayed. The house was neatly sliced in half, the staircase intact in the standing half, water, gas and electricity in order without leak, no loss of life or injury. A baby left in his cot in the attic and covered by a thick layer of fine dust was perfect once turned out and cleaned. "Perhaps that was the forerunner of a smart bomb? Perhaps the pilot was sick of dumping more bombs on Dresden and thought he'd get rid of them over the open 'veld,' as he almost did." elucidation At present presently doesn't mean at present, although it used to. Presently presently may again mean at present, but at present presently doesn't yet mean at present again. That is, presently doesn't now mean now, although it used to. Soon presently may mean now again, but now presently doesn't yet mean now again. b/w-printing-class handouts At present I'm reading and marking first proofs of my Pratt Institute class handouts, which will presently be published in magazine format by Photo Techniques. 0 what a tangled web we weave / When first we practice to deceive. Tangle-free deception takes plenty of practice. Working on it. The handouts should be on newsstands and available by mail order this fall. Lou Draper Lou Draper died a few months ago. He made sure you knew he was black and proud of it, but did not let that distract him from photographing very well. I can't think of Lou as old. A nice man, as are others of whom I can say the same, while trusting they are still at work: these notably include Ray Francis, Roy DeCarava and Eli Reed. Theirs is a difficult and honorable path. cut problems to the core In the 60s I saw this sign: "Support our First Lady's plan to beautify America's junkyards! Throw away something pretty today!" In the same spirit, GRUMP improves on our President's enlightened plan to oppose forest fires by removing the most profitable trees. We modestly propose: No forests, no forest fires! Pave all the hills and put up lovely, practical concrete trees. | |
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