Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute

Books, especially when they’re produced like this, are the best way to experience a sequence of photographs.

These photographs were taken around seventy years apart with the same camera, a Kodak Autographic Folding Brownie.

The photographer in the first picture is Mable Dean with her sister Sally, using the camera some time around the end of the 1920s, and the photographer in the second picture is her grandson, me, using the same camera in 1999.

The pictures were originally posted to the Mirror Project (mirrorproject.com) in 2000. The Mirror Project was a large archive of photographic self portraits taken in reflective surfaces. It went offline in 2008, so I retrieved them from the Wayback Machine and reposted them here.

While my picture was shot in a mirrored window, I’ve since realised that my grandmother’s picture isn’t a mirror shot at all. I printed it from the original negative, which I assumed had been shot with the Brownie in a mirror, but I always wondered why there would be a mirror standing in a field! Also, the distortion on the image is most likely a fault on the negative emulsion that occurred during processing rather than a distortion in a mirror.

The main giveaway is the position of our hands when the pictures were taken. The shutter release is at the front of the camera on the right hand side. In the picture of my grandmother, she is using her right hand to take the picture. In my picture, it appears that I’m pressing a shutter release with my left hand because it’s a mirrored image (and I’m pretty sure I printed both negatives the right way round).

The most likely scenario is that the photo was taken by my great-grandfather, Joseph Dean, as my grandmother took a picture of him. Of course, the best evidence for this would be to find the other negative from the Brownie, which unfortunately is very unlikely to happen.

View set

Photography is under attack. Across the country it that seems anyone with a camera is being targeted as a potential terrorist, whether amateur or professional, whether landscape, architectural or street photographer.

Not only is it corrosive of press freedom but creation of the collective visual history of our country is extinguished by anti-terrorist legislation designed to protect the heritage it prevents us recording.

This campaign is for everyone who values visual imagery, not only photographers.

We must work together now to stop this before photography becomes a part of history rather than a way of recording it.

I’m a Photographer, not a Terrorist

Despite the falling price of decent digital cameras, analog photography on the web is still going strong. The sharpness and colour accuracy of transparency film is unbeatable [by current consumer digital cameras], especially if you take pictures with a medium format camera like Joshua Dunford [if you’re lucky, you can pick up a second-hand one of these pretty cheaply – my C330 was 75 Pounds Sterling]. This, coupled with the falling price of quality flatbed transparency scanners means that you can make images for the web which blow digital images away.

New stuff at altsense.net:
A Eulogy for Design
Preview Goree – an experiment using javascript and photography.

Kumbh Mela pictured from space

A few years ago, my Grandmother [who turned 90 this year] gave me an old Kodak Folding Camera. It had been sitting in a cupboard gathering dust for years and I decided that it was finally time for it to be used again. Back in the 1920’s, she took it with her on seaside excursions, taking pictures of her family, friends and fashions of the time. Along with the camera, she also gave me some original negatives, many of which have never been printed. So, off I went to the darkroom with the negs and a fresh box of Ilford paper to see what happened. What I found was a snapshot history of my Grandmother from when she was a teenager up until when she was married [and presumably when the camera was consigned to gathering dust in the cupboard]. One picture I printed was a ‘Jezebel’s Mirror’ type of shot; my Grandmother with the camera, looking down into the viewfinder, and to her right her sister gazing into the lens. It was amazing to see this and realise that experimentation while snapshooting [lomography, wristcam style imagery etc] is nothing new – it was something that came along with miniaturisation of cameras and hasn’t gone since. In 1998, hoping that it still functioned, I decided to do some work with this old camera. At first it was difficult because it’s not possible to get the type of roll-film for it anymore [an out-dated imperial measurement], but eventually I worked out how to use a standard roll of 120 instead. With the mirror-shot that my grandmother took in mind, I took a picture of myself in the reflective window of a 1960’s office block in the centre of Newcastle. The picture was difficult to print as the film had fogged severely [due to holes in the camera bellows]. But I got a decent picture anyway, and here it is displayed at Friends of Jezebel’s Mirror, shown alongside my grandmothers picture taken 70 years earlier with the same camera. Thanks to Heather for uploading it – the mirror project is top notch.

One day, I went out with a broken Kodak camera… the focus didn’t work. I didn’t really care, I just went to see what happened. It was about 9pm and as the sun was dipping below the horizon, it draped an orange light over the beach. I walked past a chalet with a plastic chair and a red litter bin outside, a bored kid wandering aimlessly, just as I was. I was photographing for the sake of it, for the pleasure of just taking pictures. To the right, grass covered sand dunes blocked my view of the sea. Instead, there was a red lamp-post and another red litter bin, so I photographed them. I wanted to see the sea, so I walked towards the dunes and took another picture. People had walked my route before, the grass worn down to the sand as they zig-zagged their way up the incline and closer to the water. People like to look out to sea, I’m sure there is a unique part of the human brain solely geared for responding in some way to the sea. It makes you want to take a picture. Once over the dune, I looked back to see two figures as the sun disappeared behind them. I wasn’t aware of them at the time, I only realised they had been there when I looked at the image. I walked away from the beach and onto the road where there was another red lamp-post and something unknown that was blue, so I photographed what I could see. There is no conclusion to this story, only a kind of moral; that sometimes it is best to give creative control to ‘chance’. This works well with the medium of analog photography, because there are so many unknown variables, but I’ve been thinking about ways in which this could be applied to web design and how designers might free themselves from formulaic designing by working in this way.

rowenadugdale.com – some really nice illustration work using photomontage.

The Lomo is a very simple camera (originating from St Petersburg, Russia), which offers absolutely no control over shutter speed, aperture and focus of the image. The ideology of lomography is akin to that of Kodak when they introduced ‘mass photography’ at the beginning of the 20th Century. Via the relatively compact and inexpensive cameras Kodak produced, photography became a pass-time enjoyed by everyone and not just those who could afford it [or had room in their house for a darkroom]. Kodak were the first to introduce a system whereby a camera and film were bought as one (easy to use) unit, then after the film was shot, the whole camera was posted back to Kodak and processed. A few days later, the camera – loaded with fresh film – would return in the post ready for use again. The Lomo site has a similar system whereby you snail mail your exposed films, they then scan the negatives and upload the images to your personal space at lomo.com. A few days later, your prints and negs arrive in the post along with a ‘goody bag’ of stuff. It’s a cool idea and one that is taking the tradition of analog photography into the digital age. I don’t know how long it will last before hi resolution digital cameras become affordable to the masses, but there is something so appealing about this camera and analog technology is by no means dead yet. The Lomo Action Sampler [the other camera in the Lomo range] is definitely on my list for Santa.

Wristcam Photography at Famewhore. I love the whole ethos of lomographic type stuff.

If you would like one of your images to be included in the random image generator at the top, simply email a 400×170 gif or jpeg and I’ll upload it.