Alfa Romeo

New York, New York

Everyone walking around in town is either talking on the phone, or absorbed in listening to something that's not related to the surroundings or the moment. Why? There's so much to see on every block.

Walk this Way

Hudson, New York

A Springtime Walk in Naugatuck, 4/28/19

Naugatuck (Union City), Connecticut

Walking to the Sun

New Delhi, India, 1970

Another picture from the 1969-70 IHP scholarship trip that I never printed before, but really like now.

A couple private questions have come in about what I was shooting with way back then, so a little bit of techy-doo. I had a Leica M4 with 35mm Summilux, and a 28mm Elmarit that I bought in Hong Kong (as planned long in advance) about eight weeks into the trip. Also a Pentax H3v with 55mm and 105mm Takumar lenses. Gossen Luna-Six light meter. Tri-X film.

To return to the editing theme, the twelve-shot edit I've referred to a couple times in recent posts was done around 1990, twenty years after the trip. Reviewing everything, I'm surprised to find that I mostly agree with the edit, in the sense of if it has to be just twelve pictures, these are the ones. The interesting thing is if I open it up to two or three dozen selections, they would include pictures I printed shortly after the trip, and a few that I never noticed before. An interesting side point is that the twelve-shot edit is all from Leica shots—not because I was being snobbish about it but because at that point I was in a pretty extreme position of preferring short lens work (probably a reaction to the commercial work I was doing to make a living at the time where long lens work was very much au courrant). I still vastly favor short lenses (as I can examine with a couple clicks in Bridge to see what lenses were used for last month's pictures, not to mention that I don't even own any "long" lenses for any of my large and ultra-large format cameras). But still, there's a look to a tightly cropped viewpoint that just somehow works, every now and then.Very seldom for me, but sometimes. This must have been made with the 105 Takumar, and I like it.

City Trees, and Six Dishes

Naugatuck, Connecticut

Another Overlooked Picture

Sperlonga, Italy, 1970

The IHP group traveled from Israel (where we spent six weeks at an atheistic Kibbutz, which didn't help my religious ritual project, though I got some material for it on a couple of side trips by bus to Jerusalem) to Sperlonga for, more or less, Spring Break. The little town clings to the face of a cliff on the west coast of Italy, south of Rome. Many of the group ran off to see the rest of western Europe (which wasn't on our itinerary for the study stays) for a few days, depending on interest and financial resources. I went up to Rome for a couple of days, on a weekend of course, to photograph in Vatican City for my ritual project. But I was happy to spend the rest of the break back in this incredible little place of vertiginous stairways and uncountable layers of stucco. Plus, I want to point out that I was taking cat pix decades before the internet.

Hidden Treasure

New Delhi, India, 1970

This year is the 50th anniversary of a scholarship trip with the International Honors Program, 1969-70, that I took part in as my third year of college. More than half of the thirty students, and one of the three professors, will be getting together for a reunion this September at the Shaker Village at Pleasant Hill in Kentucky. This is appropriate since the study theme of the trip was utopian thought and communities. The faculty allowed me to do a text and pictures project for academic credit, studying religious ritual in the communities we visited in the ten countries we traveled to. This let me concentrate nearly all of my attention on photography and writing (not all for the project) which was a great experience. A dozen pictures from the trip make up the earliest web gallery on my web site, linked here.

Over the past week I've been going through my fifty year old proof sheets and selecting pictures for scanning—snapshots of group activities that show the other students and faculty that I think they'll enjoy seeing after all these years. While I was at it, I rescanned the twelve pictures in that gallery because I think my current scanner is capable of better results than the one I used a dozen years ago. I also decided to loosen up on that extremely tight edit. I scanned dozens of additional pictures, many of them ones that I printed back in 1970 as part of the ritual project, some of them pictures I printed back then that weren't part of the project—pictures good enough for me to use in my professional portfolio back in the early 1970s.

In addition, I found several pictures that I somehow never noticed before, but now love. Hidden treasures. The shot above (click on the image to see a larger and better view) must have been made late in the afternoon of the same day as picture eight in the gallery

I have no idea why I never printed this before—never even noticed it back in 1970. Or in 1990 when I made the twelve-shot edit for printing, nor a dozen years ago when I went through the work to scan the negatives in the twelve-shot portfolio. However it reminds me of something the great photographer and teacher David Vestal insisted on: your proofsheets (today, think browser window) are your most important photographic tool, more important than any camera or lens can ever be. They represent your photographic autobiography, and you must never discard (delete, today) any of the pictures. He even pointed out in the 70s that color photographers were at a disadvantage because of this (back at that time all serious color photographers shot transparency film because color negative film wasn't good enough; it didn't get good until big improvements in the early 1980s). People edited their Kodachrome slides down to the best and tossed the rest. Vestal called this a big mistake, because you may likely find that your editing decisions will be different ten or twenty (or fifty!) years later. He slyly pointed out as well that decades on you might very well have become a better photographer, which would also mean being a better editor of your own work.

On a technical note, these negatives are not, as you might expect, in the most terrific shape. In one sense I have a hankering to get some Ilford Multigrade paper and take the dust cover off the Leitz Focomat enlarger, but the idea of spotting the resulting prints is daunting. Cleaning up the scans is kind of amazing when I remember what it was like with the earlier scans of these negatives. Photoshop tools have improved so much, mainly the content-aware healing brush, that about two minutes is enough to clean up scans of negatives that I spent half an hour or more spotting back then. And 10x15 inch prints on Canson Baryta 310 with my HP Z3200 are looking good.

Back on the trip, I said that I expected "something developed from TV" to take over photographic technology in less than twenty years. I'd been reading too much science fiction. It took twenty years for digital tools to take over post production for publication, then another fifteen for digital capture to become acceptably capable. The best digital capture is now a mature new medium. It doesn't replace film—it's different. But it's very good. Digitizing fifty year old negatives is also a good alternative to printing them the old way. Whether with proof sheets or a browser, carefully revisiting old work is always informative, and sometimes yields very pleasant surprises.

Along Rubber Avenue

Naugatuck, Connecticut

Guard Posts

Naugatuck, Connecticut

Perhaps the post on the right served its purpose and protected the hydrant from an errant car or truck in the parking lot.

FOR SALE

Naugatuck, Connecticut