Today I received as my primary print a beautifully delicate 4x5 cyanotype from Peter Schrager. And a couple of days ago I also received as a secondary submission an equally beautiful silver print from Menno Spijker.
The cyanotype is a quietly dignified study of the Herald Examiner Building on South Broadway just north of Pico in Los Angeles, California. Having been born and raised in the greater Los Angeles area, I recognized the Spanish/Moorish mission-style façade immediately. As well as the William Randolph Hearst newspaper the building once gloriously housed, and to which my parents faithfully subscribed all during my youth.
Today this beautiful building is empty, the Herald Examiner having published its final edition in 1989. A sad end for the newspaper that first broke the story of the sensational, but never-solved, Black Dahlia murder. But also a history and current state of affairs that makes Peter's inclusion of a very faint and ghostly figure, wonderfully anticipated and preserved in mid-stride across the now-shuttered entry doors leading to the now silent newsroom, just perfectly poignant.
The silver print from Menno depicts a far more vivacious fashion study of a young lady playing directly to the camera. She is perched mid-kick on one leg, while she kicks up the heel of the other. Eyes fixed directly on the viewer, hands perfectly placed, back arched, body perfectly angled, the entire instant could not have lasted longer than a tiny fraction of a second.
Yet she looks at and connects directly with her audience, sharing a sense of her personality and attitude, almost as if she had just concluded a short conversation with you. It's an amazing quantity and quality of communication achieved in but the most fleeting of moments.
To anyone reading along who has never participated in one of the APUG print exchanges, you should seriously consider doing so. Holding a real print in your hands is light-years removed from looking at a scan reproduction of a print or negative on an LCD monitor. There is no comparison, really. Except perhaps less than positive ones.
The reality of hosting an international gathering of analog photographers requires digitization of both images and words. It's a handicap we all must mentally adjust for every time we look at a gallery "print". Or "speak" with another member.
But in these print exchanges the experience becomes pure again. Someone somewhere labored in a darkroom with their bare hands to create and send you something to hold and directly view in your bare hands. There are no additional abstractions involved beyond the original photographic one of reducing three dimensions to two.
And that distinction makes all the difference...
Ken
Thanks Eugene! (Yeah, those rules are rubbish.)
