Saturday, December 26, 2009

Derelict Drive-in Theater

Uncasville, Connecticut

For a while now (1,243 posts, in fact) this blog has concentrated on recent color work I've been doing with digital capture. Over the past several years I've been doing much less large format black and white work than before, but I have been doing some. I've been scanning the best of these negatives over the past week, and I thought I'd stretch the sense of recent from a few months to a few years.

The picture above shows part of what's left at the Norwich-New London Twin Drive-in Theater. It's a fairly recent—that word again—addition to my long-term project on drive-in theaters. If you click on the picture you'll get a much more legible, larger version. Use your browser's back button to return.

4 comments:

Martina said...

As you might have guessed: I am looking forward to seeing many many many of these b/w photos on your blog now!
This is definitively one to look at in larger size, the emptiness in the foreground is breathtaking.

Carl Weese said...

Thank you, Martina. As for large, the bigger file you get by clicking only hints at what's there.

The negative is 7x17 inches (6.5x16 scan-able live area on my equipment actually) and the scan has been prepared for printing at 16x40 inches, the largest I can go on my 17" wide printer.

Since a 16x40 is less than a 2.5X enlargement from the original negative, the descriptive power is quite amazing. As you can guess, I really like what happens with a highly formal approach to vernacular subject matter like this.

Martina said...

As for large, the bigger file you get by clicking only hints at what's there.
Yes, I thought so, ;-).

Just googled 7"x17" (since I am not that knowledgable about large format formats) and guess what the 4th hit with google.de is:

this.

Markus Spring said...

I was impressed when I first say your images of abandoned drive-in movie theaters, quite a while ago. In my eyes they do deserve a wide audience. Probably here the subject matter is in best resonance with your very dry style of portraying your environment. And in this combination b&w really adds to the image, removing distractions, avoiding repetition and adding emphasis to forms.