Coloured Film!

 

Coloured film I have shot recently. The bottom middle preserve sheet isn’t pictures I took myself but from a roll I found inside a thrifted camera that I got developed! I found this ‘mystery’ film roll really exciting. 

   The left most preserve sheets are lomography purple pétillant film, and the top two that appear orange are fujifilm 400.

photo 1 - John Chiara

 

    John Chiara is a contemporary American experimental photographer based in California. Chiara creates his images by directly manipulating photosensitive paper. To counter loss of information during the enlargement process in the dark room, he developed his own large cameras. His process seems to borrow from pinhole photography (but more complicated) and is described as the following:

“Once he selects a location, he situates, and then physically enters, the camera, and maneuvers in near total darkness a sheet of positive color photographic paper onto the camera's back wall.  Throughout each exposure, his instinctive control limits the light entering the lens. He uses his hands to burn and dodge the large-scale images, and develops them in a spinning drum by agitating the chemistry over photographic paper lining the interior of the drum. This process often leaves traces behind on the resulting images.”

…

Chiara's photographs are strongly perceptual, eliciting a visceral response, yet are rendered in soft hues that exude a strong sense of the viscosity of material and the ephemerality of presence. 

-These effects of the spinning drum, and his overall development/creation process for the photographs creates “imperfections” that Chiara embraces, but at the same time his photographs are highly detailed because of the large paper and cameras.

photo 1 - Fred Herzog - Kodachrome

 

Man With Bandage, 1968

archival pigment print

Research (book from library: Fred Herzog Photographs, published by C|O Berlin):

-Fred Herzog (1930-2019) was a German Canadian photographer who emigrated to Vancouver in 1953. He took coloured street photographs of Vancouver, using almost exclusively Kodachrome slide film (one of the early commercial colour films, know for it’s high resolution, life like colour, and broad tonal range).

-Herzog challenged the notion in the art world that colour photography was only for commercial and amateur use. His work shows that colour photography is not only as valid as black and white photography (something that isn’t much of an argument today, but was a big deal during the mid 20th century) but that colour can add elements to a scene that would otherwise be missing with black-and-white photography. Herzog is regarded as one of the early masters of colour photography.

-“Herzog’s photographs demonstrate that colour photography is not the addition of colour to a traditional black-and-white approach, but an autonomous means of expression.”

-Herzog took photographs of Vancouver in an attempt to discover the city and preserve his impressions of it. There is an overlying theme in his work of postwar urban culture, which branches off into various pictorial representations such as people on the street, old local businesses, and displays/advertising.

-Beginning in the 1960s Herzog would work as a medical photographer alongside his street photography.

(A few) notable Herzog photographs:

-Used Car Lot (1970)

-Mom (1959)

-Chung Wah (1960)

-His Last Bubble Gum (1960)

-AI Western Second Hand Store (1958)

-Paper Vendor (1959)

-Bargain Shop (1962)

-Lucy/Georgia (1968)