J. S. Oppenheim — All Together

Every new computer was “the last one!’

🙂

I hope the rebuilt desktop will be that.

Built in 2007 for “straight photography”, it has more capacity today (2.5-TB) and is a little more up to date with its software complement.  Still, by about this time next year, it will be a 32-bit dinosaur, and the way things are going, I will probably still be living with it.

Had I, if I, focus primarily on writing, I could well revert to foolscap and a pen accompanied by short stints involving cloud-based manuscript typing.

This, however, is not the 19th Century, even as much as I enjoy living in its remnant by way of a gent’s library and a bit of imagination; the way back to that technological simplicity has been lost (barring, of course, the onset of global thermonuclear war).

With photography . . . the manual “FM3a” has had a roll of film in it for more than a year, and I’ve no idea what I was shooting when I put it back in its bag.

* * *

Art making with cameras and computers has been funny all the way, of course.

Photography has had always in it a nostalgic longing and often reversion to earlier technologies even with latest technology throughput.  That’s Doisneau walking around with a wooden box and tripod when he could have been carrying a 35mm like Bresson; it’s Sally Mann pushing herself through collodion processing but publishing Deep South off a modern enough press.  Here’s an extension of that work by way of a treat on YouTube:

I doubt while apartment dwelling that I will return to film — no darkroom.

However, and in addition to old low-dpi scans on DVDs, there are boxes here packed with 35mm  and (some) medium format negatives and transparencies, and I have scanners.

* * *

I’m not so in love this morning with the multiple persona and their weaving journey in cyberspace: my studio, such as it may be, needs work!

Consequently, I will probably be more free on this blog to boast, post, commiserate, and experiment than on the other which needs to “pull” from whatever region may be defined by Mustang range x compensation.

That true 19th Century gent may have been both a product of aristocracy and creative writing: with some commitment to aesthetics and art making, I’ve been more the “bum o’ the family” and such has probably proven harder work — made even more difficult today by a cantankerous, dying (perhaps), and expensive printer — than anything else.

Just holding out, holding on, staying around, has been a brutal match.

Quite obviously, I would not have had it any other way.

You like looking at pictures.

I love being out and discovering them.

It’s not like me, at least until the present, to make much of routines that end in standard forms, especially those titles: detail, object, city, state, month day, year.  However, I have to admit, the format keeps things poker-faced simple.

Blunt.

One thing reinforced: the importance of notes when trying to recall the basics about pictures a decade old.

Some of this week’s feed has come off a work perpetually in progress, Maryland Food Traditions, which I, as photographer, took up a long time ago as a six-month project (to be published by Johns Hopkins University Press) only to suffer it becoming a pokey six-year-long ordeal, not that I minded going out to shoot for a book: then as now, I just wanted the thing done, up there on the retail shelf, and producing some royalty.

The writer hung with the project a while longer — he who has the accompanying interview notes has been sent e-mail on all this — but it sure seems shelved these days, and not in the way intended.

In any case, my file naming process, which had been with mounted transparencies YYMMDD-roll-frame, has provided the key for looking up old pictures — or becoming intrigued by what’s sitting in boxes back in the closet:  “990213 N. Tract Bailey’s Marsh / geese pond pictures 1500-1605 f/8,11,16 30/60-250 . . . shot one stop under / Minolta XD11 w/ motor drive / 80-200 f/4.5 / meter dimming after 1 hour, 32-deg.F., steady wind: results: under by 1 – good effect.”

Where the heck is page “990213” and what’s on it?

Whatever it may be, I haven’t seen a frame of it for 14 years.

🙂

Mine really has been a pro-am indulgence and effort.

I had intended to shoot a few weddings to pay for it, and indeed still offer that service (also commercial, photojournalism, portraiture).

Even with film costs more or less a part of the past (I am keeping my Nikon FM3a, thank you) and great digital equipment at hand, the costs associated with computing (main box rebuilt like new!) and printer inks and papers have filled in for the annual cost-of-doing-business ouch (much less the cost of not doing business!).

Ouch!

Watch out for the heavy marketing (editorial / research / photography services) at Communicating Arts . . . .