Group Portrait

Ruskin, Florida

Last October during my week-long artist-in-residence stay at The Firehouse Cultural Center, one of the interesting activities was a meeting with the art students at the nearby regional high school. We began the session by setting up the 8x10 Deardorff and 7x17-inch Korona cameras in front of the school. Most of the kids had never seen anything like a view camera before, much less looked at the upside-down-and-backwards image on the ground glass. They really got into it and began to pose for each other in front of and behind the camera. Then someone suggested a group portrait, which seemed like a good idea. This was one of the negatives in this morning's processing run.

Then we went inside and I put out some rather large digital prints (13x32") made from 7x17 negatives. They seemed quite fascinated, being much more familiar with photographic work on screen than as finished prints. They also asked some perceptive questions in the following Q&A—a rewarding group of young people to spend a few hours with.