Restoring a Vintage Lens

As well as the usual souvenirs and peppermint rock, a recent trip to the seaside yielded something much more worthwhile. While frittering away the dog-end of the afternoon browsing in a back-street junk shop, I came across a battered old brass lens.

Here it is, screwed onto a home-made lens board. I did it so my students could use it to experiment with paper negatives in a 5"x4" camera. I thought it might be from an old projector or magic lantern, given that it had a fixed aperture, no shutter mechanism and was focused by a rack-and-pinion. The only thing that made me doubt this assumption was that it had a lens hood (removed in the above photo) – not something you would expect on a lens where the light comes out of the lens, rather than going in.

The main problem with the lens was that the focusing spindle was badly bent so that the pinion teeth didn't properly mate with the teeth on the rack, which meant that it couldn't be reliably focused. Given it was in such poor condition and had cost me next to nothing, it seemed like it might be fun to try and get it back into better order.

Needless to say, the lens came apart pretty easily. A lens like this is a classic example of form and function co-existing in simple harmony, the function of each part being evident by its appearance. There are only six screws in all, four holding the pinion against the rack with two more keeping the rack in place. Other than that, the individual components go together by screwing one into another.

The first task was to clean off the accumulated grime and corrosion. While serious collectors have strong views on what should or shouldn't be done, my interest is in the lens's functionality rather than its collect-ability. Vinegar seemed to do a good job of tackling corrosion, while regular paint stripper brought off dirty and discoloured lacquer.

The most interesting discovery at this point, which ultimately led me to identifying the lens's provenance, was finding some crudely stamped letters on the inside of the lens hood.

Before cleaning, the corroded interior of the lens hood was coated with remnants of  black paint, but when this was cleared away the roughly-stamped word DARLOT and the number 12 were revealed. I suspect that originally, they would have been hidden by a felt or velvet lining and were not intended to be seen. The only other clues I had to go on were the letters AG and number 6680 engraved on the lens barrel.

As the word Darlot meant nothing to me, I thought it might be worth doing a web search. I'm glad I did; it set me off on a hyperlinked journey from which I learned an enormous amount about lens history and design.

The first thing I discovered, showing my ignorance, was that Alphonse Darlot of Paris was a major maker of photographic lenses in the second half of the nineteenth century.

This pdf of a lens catalogue from 1890 shows a range of Darlot lenses.

 Interestingly, the catalogue warns that, "there are many spurious Darlot lenses and worthless imitations in the market". Certainly, my lens lacks the usual ornate engraving and is somewhat flimsy compared to other old lenses I've handled. Anyway, to cut a long story short, my web searches soon revealed that the letters AG might refer to Alexis Gaudin, a Parisian lens maker who had a London shop in the 1850s-60s.

This was confirmed later when I dismantled the rear lens element to clean the inside faces. Written around the thick rim of one glass was a pencilled inscription, Gaudin et Frère 1855 Paris (word illegible) No. 1

Discoveries like this are always quite exciting. To find something as fragile as pencil marks still surviving after being hidden for almost 160 years is like unexpectedly opening a time capsule. I felt like Thoreau when he wrote of finding an arrowhead, "I come closer to the maker of it than if I found his bones. His bones would not prove any wit that wielded them, such as this work of his bones does."

Having dismantled the lens, and before reassembling it, I decided to measure the individual parts and make a scale drawing.

The line drawing was made at twice actual size, comfortably fitting on an A3 sheet of paper. It was then scanned, cleaned up, coloured and annotated in Photoshop.

Technical specifications of the lens, such as focal length, were determined through experimentation. I intend to write about this in a future post. Going back to my original thoughts about it being a projector lens, I now realise that the absence of Waterhouse stops is because they had not yet been introduced. As I said earlier, I've learned an awful lot with this little lens.

Building a Wooden Camera

One of the pleasures of living in a state of semi-retirement is having time to indulge in inessential but absorbing activities. This Summer's main time-absorber was building a wooden camera – still not quite complete, but well advanced on the state it was in when this picture was taken.

The project was mostly inspired by my students' enthusiasm for alternative and experimental ways of making photographs. Although they like their digital cameras, they also love doing practical things that involve physically interacting with materials. There is a tangible and tactile satisfaction in making things by hand that isn't gained through working solely with digital processes.

It's a subject that came into focus for me last year after reading Matthew Crawford's The Case for Working with Your Hands, which I blogged about at the time. At around the same time I was asked to teach practical and experimental course units that gave a wide scope for investigating the creative potential of alternative processes. We did a lot of experimental work with large format cameras, using improvised lenses and a variety of negative materials; we also worked with pinhole cameras and alternative print processes, particularly salt printing and cyanotypes. It was during this time I came across, quite by chance – or rather, by Amazon's predictive algorithms – an intriguing-looking book, Primitive Photography: A Guide to Making Cameras, Lenses and Calotypes, by Alan Greene.

 

While Matthew Crawford discusses the value of practical activity, Alan Greene gets straight down into hard-headed practical instruction. It is a book that inspires, but offers no shortcuts to the challenges it sets the reader. The only reward it offers is the opportunity to take photographs as eerily beautiful as those taken by the author himself. It is certainly not a book for a faint-hearted reader, as the densely-expressed instructions require a force of will to follow. The chapter on building a camera makes no allowances for improvisation, error or diversion, it is a matter of following the instructions exactly, step by step, not ever being quite sure which bit of the camera you're making, but with the satisfaction of seeing it gradually take shape in front of you.

Having said that, a UK-based reader like myself has to perform some mental gymnastics to turn the USA-orientated instructions into action. While our two nations are famously divided by a common language, we are also divided by different standard systems of measurement and by a variation in the materials that are readily available. Greene makes extensive use of basswood for example, a scarce and unreasonably expensive material here. Being determined myself to follow the underlying philosophy of the book, which is make the camera out of commonly available materials, I decided to use the nearest equivalents I could find in my local DIY stores, B&Q and Homebase.

The framing is made out of pine stripwood with the nearest metric cross-section measurements. It comes in 2.4m (9ft) lengths and is very cheap. Instead of Luan, I used 6mm exterior-grade plywood. A model aircraft shop was able to supply me with a more expensive 4mm light plywood which I'm using for darkslides.

The cumulative effect of these differences in imperial and metric dimensions has a knock-on effect on later stages of the build. For example, my negative holder, built up out of seven laminated layers of stripwood, is 4mm thicker than the author's example in the book. This necessitated me cutting out and replacing parts of the camera's internal framework that I'd innocently cut to the sizes given in the plans. Suffice to say, my copy of the book has been heavily annotated with points to note for future builds.

This has been a book and a project that I would recommend to anyone. Building the camera has been an instructive and satisfying experience that should provide lots of further fun, building lenses and recreating those early negative processes.

Busy Times

Looking out over the Atlantic, North Uist. Photo by A. Smith

Hell's Bells – What a Month! If Summer is meant to be a time for roller coaster rides, then June has lived up to expectations, despite the unseasonal weather. A busy month, work-wise, starting with a week in the Outer Hebrides, working on plans for reviving a documentary project; then two alternative processes workshops and ending with the diploma student show – the culmination of the most enjoyable teaching year of my entire career.

Lots of little highlights along the way – such as being reminded yet again of the time I photographed Hercules the Grizzly Bear, newly recaptured after three-weeks of freedom on Uist.

Taigh Chearsabhagh, the Arts Centre in Lochmaddy, are planning some kind of commemoration of this 1980 event and wanted to see my pics. It's a story worth telling, but I'll save it for a later post.

Some Large Format Experiments

In spare moments, while the fine weather has continued, I've been continuing my experiments with large format paper negatives. Developing them in film developer rather than regular paper developer has proved to be a very promising experiment. More about that in a later post, I hope.

Meanwhile, I've been tinkering with the cameras themselves. My old Linhof press camera is proving to be a useful test rig for trying out a few of my ramshackle assortment of discarded lenses.

One of the minor faults with the Linhof has been the broken ground glass screen, split right across from side to side and only held together by the spring clips in the camera back. It still works, but it's distracting to look at. The prompt to do something about it came when a student gave me a 12"x 16" piece of picture-frame glass left over from a studio shoot.

Having no better use for it, I cut some pieces to fit the back of a 5"x4" camera. I then got hold of some lapidary grit and decided to have a go at making my own ground glass screens. I found an excellent online explanation of how to do it by an American large format photographer, Dick Dokas.

His instructions were simplicity itself to follow, and  I was thrilled with what I was able to achieve in ten minutes or so of grinding the two pieces of glass you can see in the foreground of my photo. A light sprinkling of grinding powder and water produced a very fine bright translucent finish, similar to fine tracing film. I started off thinking I would use the cheap rubber suction dent-puller (seen in the background) to hold the top piece of glass, but that was completely unnecessary. Simple finger pressure on the top piece of glass was all it needed to keep it moving.

Another problem I've been pondering is how best to control exposure times with some of the lenses I've wanted to experiment with. Some have variable apertures, but none have shutters, so some sort of independent shutter mechanism is needed. Having studied the problem, the solution (I hope) arrived yesterday by post from the USA in the shape of a Packard Shutter, bought from an eBay seller in Floyd, Virginia.

My example is clearly a vintage item, though they're still manufactured by the Packard Shutter Company in California. It's clear that there is a dedicated army of Packard users among large format photographers (predominantly in the US) judging by enthusiast webpages and YouTube videos. In its present form, my shutter is operated pneumatically by a rubber bulb connected by tubing to the piston you can see on the right in the photo. I can see why these shutters have their fans, they're an elegant and simple way of controlling exposure and a classic example of nineteenth century technical innovation.

Reassessing the Educational Value of Photography

The value and meaning of photography as an activity has changed in recent years.

This has been largely due to the Digital Revolution, a term that will just as clearly define the present historical period as the term Industrial Revolution defined the 19th Century.

Until comparatively recently, photography was a very specific activity that used standardised materials and equipment in a manner that was tightly controlled by the technical limitations of those materials.

As a photographer, your role in making photographs was generally limited to operating a camera with a greater or lesser degree of proficiency. The outcome being a folder of finished prints provided for you by technicians.

The prints could be saved and stored, displayed or reproduced, but they generally had no other function than to be a record or memento of specific people, places or events.

Any other outcome for the image was also the province of technicians, using specialised equipment and materials beyond the means of most photographers.

It was unthinkable that personal (as opposed to commercial) photographs would be displayed, published or broadcast to an audience outside a personal network of contacts.

In saying this, I seem to be describing still images. My remarks apply equally to the even more dramatic changes in the field of moving images with the move away from cine film to the endlessly rewritable medium of digital video.

Photography is now much more than an Arts and Crafts/Design activity or the medium by which we are informed or entertained by old school media.

What do these changes to the way we use photographic images mean for society and education?

Anyone who carries a mobile phone is potentially able to instantly publish images or video at any time of the night or day.

Given this, it's surely not fanciful to suggest that photography has changed in that it has become a commonplace medium of public discourse, akin to the spoken or written word.

It has become an intrinsic part of the way we converse or express ourselves, and given its broadcastability, beyond the confines of face to face interaction.

As educators, we need to recognise and accommodate this changing role of photography. It can no longer be thought of as merely another craft specialism within the confines of art and design.

It demands to be seen as a fully academic subject that encompasses the study of it in terms of its role as both a language form and as a technology that is radically modifying the forms of public discourse.

Titan Pinhole Camera Test

It's beginning to seem as if pinhole cameras are becoming a regular theme in this blog.  There's no special reason except that I can't resist tinkering with stuff that's lying around and we've had this Ilford Titan camera in college for a while now. This week, it seemed like a good time to try it out while the students were busy finishing off their project work for the end of term.

As well as wanting to get a feel for it and see how it worked, I wanted to test out a theory I have about paper negatives. The photographic paper we tend to use in the darkroom nowadays is the ubiquitous resin-coated multigrade (variable contrast) paper. Indeed, there is now very little alternative since the mass market for specialist silver-based papers was killed off by digital photography.

However, I have always found that multigrade paper negatives shot in daylight have always been excessively contrasty. I put this down to the blue content of daylight acting as a multigrade filter and hardening the contrast. Using an orange filter to counteract the blue is of little help as it merely has the effect of introducing a safelight over the lens and excessively extending the exposure time.

For this experiment, I used a box of graded paper, which took a bit of effort to source as it's not commonly stocked by our suppliers. It was Ilford Ilfospeed Resin Coated, Grade 2 (glossy). Detail should record well on the smooth surface, bearing in mind that the image would be scanned later.

For  the test, I decided to use a sunny corner of the college car park. There were white and black surfaces and plenty of sunlit and shaded mid-tones and textures. As well as taking some basic shots to get an idea of suitable exposure times, I wanted to do a further experiment.

I wanted to see if there would be a significant difference if I processed the negatives in a film developer (such as ID11), rather than paper developer (we use Ilford Multigrade).

After some preliminary trials, this is what I got with a 24 second exposure in harsh sunlight. The negative was developed in paper developer for the usual one to two minutes.

This was taken a little later, in more or less the same light conditions. This time the negative was dish developed in ID11, diluted 1:1 with water. I developed it for about ten minutes with more or less constant agitation.

Although both prints are far from perfect, I think they provide an incentive to experiment further. There is clearly a much more subtle range of tones in the second image, noticeably in the dark shrubbery above the car and in the white notice pinned to the white door. Overall, I'm impressed by the sharpness of the image – it's pretty good for a pinhole camera. I have a feeling that the vignetting will be much reduced when an optimum exposure/development balance is found.

While I was preparing to write this post, I checked out an excellent video review of the camera on the Walker Cameras website. This is the company that developed the camera for Harman/Ilford, based on their experience on manufacturing mould-injected plastic large format field cameras. I totally agree with the reviewer's positive comments and was impressed by the images he produced on his day out in Broadstairs. It's a video well worth watching, even though Leon the reviewer misreads the roman numerals on his box of Multigrade paper. Oh the joys of extemporising to camera!

The Season Turns

Now that the autumnal equinox has passed, we are having to adjust to days being shorter than nights. It's always alarming to see how rapidly the hours of daylight shorten at this time of year, and it will be even more noticeable after tomorrow, when our UK clocks revert to GMT.

However, the dark nights bring pleasures of their own, as long as we have food and warmth and enough light to work by.

Late last night I went to put my dustbin out for collection. Although it was moonless, high in the sky above me was one bright star, far brighter than anything else in the sky. Because of light pollution from the town, nothing else was visible, though as my eyes adjusted to the dark a few other stars started to appear.

Curious to know why this one object should be so bright, I Googled for answers when I got back indoors. Astronomy Central's The Night Sky with Binoculars Tonight and the National Schools' Observatory's The Whole Sky at Ten O'Clock Tonight both confirmed it was not  a star I'd seen, but the planet Jupiter. 

Jupiter

Astronomy Central said that with good binoculars I should be able to see Jupiter's moons, but that advice didn't take into account an unsteady hand and less than perfect vision. My compromise was to stick my digital camera onto a tripod, point it in the general direction and click away at a few different exposure settings in the hope of getting some usable images. The two images posted above were among the most successful. The upper image clearly shows the spherical shape of the planet, while the lower one (taken with a longer lens and longer exposure) shows two of Jupiter's moons quite distinctly visible on the left. Neither image would satisfy an astronomer – but for me, getting any sort of image at all from my chance encounter was a positive result.

The Pinhole Camera: A Shoebox Reimagined

One of the ritual Autumnal activities for new students is building pinhole cameras. The studios become littered with the dismembered or reconstructed remains of a variety of cardboard and tin containers, their new function clearly indicated by the liberal application of black gaffer tape.

Though these simple devices generally make no attempt to look good, they can produce some surprisingly attractive images. How successful they are seems to be largely a matter of chance. Some carefully crafted creations seem to frustrate their makers' attempts to produce a decent image, while other cruder cameras produce a sharp image every time. Control over the size of the pinhole and the thickness of the material it's made in are critical factors.

Shoebox pinhole photo by Gemma S

 This year, I decided I wanted to have some objective standard of construction and performance to judge our home-made efforts by, so I decided to get hold of a commercially made camera. It was also going to be useful to have one that would take regular film rather than paper negatives. A clear favourite was one of the Zero Image series of cameras; made in Hong Kong and sold by Silverprint in London.

The model I chose was the 6x9 multi-format camera, which takes 120 roll film. It is a significantly expensive camera – a lot of money for not a lot of wood, but it is undeniably beautiful and carefully hand-made. It's an eye-catcher wherever it goes.

It comes nicely packaged, wrapped in tissue paper inside a simple card box with a few extras. The photos below give a better idea of what the camera is like and how it works.

The viewing frame in the foreground allows you to estimate the field of view of the camera's various negative formats from 6x4.5 to 6x9cm. There is also a lanyard, good instructions and a numbered certificate of authenticity.

The three round windows on the back of the camera are protected by a sliding cover. They enable you to see the frame markings on the back of the film as you wind on between exposures. The sliding cover carries a rotating exposure calculation dial and this model comes with the optional bubble level.

 

To load the camera, the top and back plates are removed and the film loaded in the usual manner. It's fairly simple and straightforward.

As I've had the camera less than a week, I haven't yet had a chance to use it myself, although I've loaded it with colour transparency film to use later. In the meantime, a second year student (Jody B) took it out for an hour and shot an old roll of FP4 with it.

Sadly, I hadn't read the instructions thoroughly and misinformed her that she should base her exposures on an aperture of f250 when it should have been f55.  However, reciprocity failure came to her aid and overexposure did no harm at all to the ancient film, as the above shot of the South transept of the cathedral shows.

Steep Hill, Lincoln. Fujichrome Provia100F film. Pic by Jody B

What I hadn't realised when I was buying the camera was that there was a difference between the Zone Plate and Pinhole versions. What I had inadvertently bought was a Zone Plate rather than a Pinhole camera. The effect of the Zone Plate is noticeable as the hazy, soft-focus glow in the above image. It's a charming enough effect, but not what I want in every shot. It's a pity that the Zone Plates and Pinhole can't be swapped as I'm reluctant to start trying to modify or hack the camera about just yet.

Where To Next? Some Thoughts on Student Progression

For what it's worth, I'd like to articulate some thoughts about photography students, particularly those within the FE sector.

A recent survey I saw showed a drop this year in the number of National Diploma photography students intending to progress directly to university. Of the 50% who said they were going to seek employment, two-thirds said they planned on working straight away as freelance and/or self-employed photographers. My immediate impression was that their career plans were somewhat underdeveloped. There was no evidence that I could see that they had the remotest understanding of the legal, organisational and financial challenges that self-employment would bring. I fear that some of them may well find themselves drifting into semi-skilled jobs in which their newly-acquired qualifications are of little value.

I've sometimes been troubled by the thought that when we promote our courses, we are in danger of selling unrealistic dreams of high-flying careers to idealistic young adults. Set against that, I've always tried to instil in students the confidence to realize that their career paths are very much theirs to shape and that they should never resign themselves passively to taking only the opportunities life (and chance) may or may not offer them without any effort on their part.

Given that, I sometimes wonder whether we give students enough opportunity to look beyond the boundaries of conventional stills photography to see the wealth of related vocational opportunities that their visual and technical skills give them when combined with their personal interests and enthusiasms. Perhaps there should be more of a diagnostic, Foundation Studies in Art and Design, philosophy woven into specialist ND courses, adapting the concept of pathways and confirmatory studies.

As an example, most photography students have digital cameras that can shoot video as well as stills. Ought we to be encouraging them to construct time-based narratives? Some students could be exploring more fully photography's ability to explore and explain – and its relationship to the written word. Should we be giving them more opportunity to convert their stills into stop-motion animations? Digital media has thrown up myriad related opportunities, based on taking sideways steps, that photography students should be able to grasp. I'm often surprised that, despite the younger generation's much talked-of computer savvy-ness, their digital horizons and wider skillsets can seem curiously limited.

I wonder whether we should be developing assignments that encourage students to think of their photography in terms of outcomes that don't necessarily result in mounted prints on a wall.

Hacking a Vintage Lens

Despite having lots of more essential jobs to do, I've been spending some R and R time playing with old lenses. Here's one that I've enjoyed  messing with:

My guess is it's originally from a quarter-plate camera, given that it has a focal length of 51⁄8" (130mm). There's no shutter, but it has aperture settings running from f7.7 maximum down to f45

The engraving on the lens is as follows:
     Busch Anastigmat Ser III No.2   F:7.7  Foc.51⁄8 ins   Pat. No.19504
     R.O.J.A.   Vorm Emil Busch,  Rathenow

The chance to see what it could do came with the acquisition of an Illumitran (a top-end slide copier from the days when film transparencies were a central feature of AV production and repro). I can imagine lots of potential creative uses for the Illumitran's working bits, but for this experiment I needed to liberate the bellows that sat on top of it.

The camera end of the bellows came with a Nikon bayonet mount adaptor, while the lens end came with a 60mm enlarger lens, held in place by a couple of thumb screws. It was simple enough to swap the enlarger lens with my vintage one and mount the whole combination on top of a tripod.

Focussing was done with the lens wide open at f7.7, racking the lens back and forth with the bellows. All my test shots were then taken by stopping the lens right down to f45 and shooting at whatever slow shutter speed my hand-held light meter suggested.

My first shot was of the top of the South-West tower of Lincoln Cathedral, taken from the art school car park. The photo below shows a wider view of the car park with the tower in the background. My estimate is that the top of the tower was at least 300ft (90m) from where I stood to take the photograph.

The next shot was a portrait, taken in the shade of the car park trees. I wanted to include a distant view of the city in the background. The exposure was f45 @ 1/4sec. Tonally, the original image was very low in contrast, with lots of bluish haze. Hard tweaking with levels and curves in Photoshop was needed to get a reasonable range of tones.

 

The final shot was taken  near the North-East corner of the cathedral and is of the statue of the poet Alfred, Lord Tennyson.

This statue, which is larger than life-size, was photographed from about 90ft (27m) away. The exposure this time was 1/3sec @ f45. A slight adjustment of levels was needed to improve the tonal range, but otherwise it's very much how it came out of the camera.

Testing a Lubitel Camera

Thank goodness that better weather is here — scudding clouds and spells of bright sunshine punctuate the daily routine. The snowdrops have now faded, to be replaced by the first daffodils in the sunnier parts of the garden. The better light and longer days give the photography students better odds on getting worthwhile results with their Lomo cameras.  The craze for them shows no sign of abating and they seem to be a sought-after and much-traded commodity among my students. The Diana seems to be the current must-have, perhaps because of its medium-format cachet.

Adequate exposure has been the most common problem during the dark days of Winter. In many ways the Lomo cameras are like the old box cameras we used to use back in the '50s — only reliable in bright daylight. One exception may be the Lubitel, with its triplet lens that features a variable aperture and adjustable shutter speeds.

However, one of my students, owner of this Lubitel 2, came to me in some despair as her negatives were all out-of-focus, and she couldn't understand why. So I brought it home for the weekend to check it out. I too found it impossible to determine the focus using the waist-level viewfinder. It seems to be a clear bright glass lens rather than a ground glass or fresnel focussing screen. The image seems to be a bright virtual image that is always clear and sharp regardless of the point of focus.

The camera, which must be at least thirty years old, has clearly been partly stripped and rebuilt by a previous owner, so it could be that a ground glass focussing screen has been removed. The focussing lens is, however, marked with a distance scale so it could be focussed using that, like so many old cameras. So I decided to test the accuracy of the scale by eyeballing a piece of ground glass placed in the film plane.

The camera was clamped to a tripod with its back open and the lens locked open on the 'B' setting with a cable release. A piece of glass was taped over the back of the camera and the projected image examined with a lupe, or magnifier. The tripod was placed so that objects in the field of view corresponded to distances marked on the focussing scale. Film to subject distances were checked with a measuring tape. The results were confirmed as accurate, although the distances marked on the scale were puzzlingly quirky, being marked 1.4,  2,  2.8,  4,  5.6,  8,  and 11 Metres plus Infinity, in imitation of an extended aperture scale (though the maximum aperture of the camera lens is f4.5).

All that's left is for us to put a test roll through the camera and check the results we get by focussing using the scale rather than the viewfinder. If we get a result, I'll post an image here.

Two Days Later (photo by Lucy B)

Here's the result. This photograph was taken today in the street outside the art school. One of the second-year students gleefully took off with the camera loaded with an old roll of Ilford FP4, expiry-dated 2004. I hope she stuck to my advice to focus on the hyperfocal distance for general views like this. The hand-held light meter was giving readings of f8@1/60th sec on a very overcast day.

It's not too bad, I guess, though it's very soft. The neg scan was at 1200ppi. The sign for Steep Hill on the building on the right is not legible although the sign for the Pot Shop high on the building to the left is just about readable on the actual negative. General advice on the Web for focussing with the Lubitel seems to be to stop the aperture right down (and I would add 'use a tripod'). Anyway, that's something to try another day! Flavour of the week this week for the first-years seems to be disposable cameras and Do-It-Yourself C41 processing. It's all because of the cheap colour films they can get at Poundland.

On the subject of film, we're thrilled with the results we're getting with our new supply of Czech-made FomaPan 100. The negative quality makes you fall in love with black and white all over again! It's available in all formats at a brilliant price from Silverprint.

Diane Arbus at Nottingham Contemporary

Earlier this month, I paid my first visit to the new Nottingham Contemporary to catch the tail-end of the Diane Arbus exhibition. This exhibition is one of the Artist Rooms circulating shows and will be shown at Aberdeen Art Gallery and Tate Modern early in 2011.

This is not reversed, the signage has been painted that way

Nottingham Contemporary is very conveniently located only a few yards away from the upper level exit from the Broadmarsh Shopping Centre. It is a curious-looking building. Whatever delights it may contain in the way of exhibitions, the building itself has an aggressive, forbidding exterior. Its relatively windowless outside walls are painted a drab camouflage green, making it look like a casemate or fortified gun emplacement. One could well imagine that it would look quite at home along the Maginot Line or among the World War II defences of the Normandy Coastline. Like those structures, it is a multi-level building built down into the ground, descending into a disused railway cutting where the old Great Central Railway once entered a tunnel that burrowed deep beneath the heart of the city. 

Maybe it's my ageing eyesight, but I completely missed the main entrance, which is part of the long glass wall beneath the overhang in the lower photograph. Having walked straight past it without seeing that one part of the glass wall was a door, I went down the outside stairs to a patio outside the lower level. There, I could get into the gallery café and up the inside stairs to the main exhibition area.

Once inside the gallery, the exhibition lived up to all the positive reports I'd heard from the students who had already been to see it. Given that her work is so well-known, there is little I feel I can add except to note the pleasure of looking at first-generation and vintage prints of images usually seen as reproductions in books. The classic images we know so well – the identical twins and the boy with the hand grenade – were all there alongside a wealth of images that give an idea of a much broader range to her work.

 

While all of her work draws our attention to what the exhibition leaflet calls 'the unusual in the ordinary', many of her photographs avoid an emphasis on the grotesque and freakish and 'reflect her broader interest in the rituals and customs of self-contained groups'. In this, it is easy to see the inspiration she drew from the documentary portraiture of August Sander, whose influence she readily acknowledged. 

It was an exhibition that would repay a second visit, so it will be a pleasure to go and see it when it travels to London in March alongside what should be an equally fascinating exhibition on the work of Joseph Beuys.

Silhouettes and Photography

It's always good fun to look through catalogues of upcoming local auctions to see what goodies are coming up for sale. You can play the game of guessing which items will sell for peanuts and which will have bids running way beyond the auctioneer's estimate. I sometimes like to make a fantasy short-list of things I would bid for myself, though I'm seldom tempted into making actual bids.

My eye was caught this month by a nice lot of four cut-paper silhouette pictures that were catalogued: "K.Kaskoune. A pair of early 20thC paper silhouettes and collage pictures and two similar pictures one inscribed "Blecke" 20 x 20cm". The auctioneers estimate was £40 to £80 for the group of four. Here are photos of two of them, copied and cleaned up from the dodgy originals in the online catalogue:


I liked them because they express so very clearly the spirit of the age in which they were created, the 1920's, often referred to as the "Jazz Age". I like the iconography of the period too, the distinctive style of dress and furniture, and the Art Deco stylisation of form in drawing with its use of Pierrot characters, or Cupid, who always seems to be in trouble for bringing love into flirtatious relationships.

In the event, the lot went for more than the top estimate, but for far less than I would have been prepared to pay. A bit of light web-searching showed that these cut-outs were by two significant practitioners of this art form. For example, a Blecke silhouette can be found in the Library of Congress collection and he is referred to in art dealers inventories. The attribution "K.Kaskoune" is interesting as it is clearly a mis-reading of the signature "F. Kaskeline", where the flowery K has been read as F and the capitalised ELI has been read as OU. An easy mistake to make with an unfamiliar name.

Here are the two remaining silhouettes in the set (as found):



My interest in these pictures was prompted because of the silhouette's significant place in the pre-history of photography. The shadow of a person cast on a surface had long been exploited as a way of making a simple likeness by tracing around it and filling it in. The sensitivity of silver salts to light was discovered by J.H. Schulze in the early eighteenth century, so it was a logical step for later photographic pioneers such as Tom and Josiah Wedgwood to attempt to use silver nitrate to make decorative silhouettes by the action of light. Though their experiments were ultimately unsuccessful, they provided an important stepping-stone in the evolution of the silver-based photographic processes that are still being used today.

The Power of Images: the Making of an Icon

Sorting through a bundle of ephemeral scraps I'd brought back from my recent trip to Edinburgh and the Festival, I came across a page I'd torn from the Saturday Magazine supplement of the Scotsman. It was a listings page that contained a small (roughly 3cm square) photograph of Florence Nightingale.

(A number of programmes were broadcast during August to mark the centenary of her death)

Roland Barthes and others have written at length about the compelling power of photographs, but I was interested to know why I was drawn to this particular image.

The tight head-shot of a Victorian subject against a dark background immediately called to mind Julia Margaret Cameron's iconic images, though I knew that the photograph wasn't hers.

At that small scale, reproduction through a coarse dot screen gave the image a contrasty, Warhol-like, graphic arts quality. The semi-abstract reduction of the image to a matrix of dots is more apparent when the image is enlarged.

Primarily though, it is the quality of the character we read into the face that draws our attention, for it is the face of a woman whose life and achievements working for the public good have become legendary. Like the votive image of a saint, versions of this portrait now adorn everything from key rings and cushion covers to tee shirts.

It is a face that seems to signify goodness through its serene, self-confident expression and simple beauty — the simple beauty, that is, of someone who possesses regular features. She could well be seen as a Madonna, or the heroine of a story by the Brontés or Dickens. I liked it enough to wonder where the image came from.

There appear to be eight known photographs of Florence Nightingale in existence, and the source of this one seems to be a carte-de-visite photograph taken (probably) by Goodman of Derby.

The invention of the wet collodion photographic process in about 1851 gave photographers the opportunity to make good quality glossy albumen prints from glass negatives. These prints could be mounted onto card and sold.

Cartes of famous Victorians were published in large numbers for the public to collect and mark an important stage in the evolution of celebrity culture as we know it today. Although eminent Victorians recognised the value of promoting their image through photography, things did not always go smoothly. There is a story of Alfred Lord Tennyson's discomfort at being pestered in public by a stranger who recognised him from his photograph.

Having found the source of my newspaper image, I was intrigued by slight but significant differences between the faces in the cropped and original versions.

The red outline indicates the original height before vertical compression.

It's clear that the crop in the newspaper version has been tilted to make the head more upright. Interestingly, it has also been compressed vertically, which has the effect of making the eyes and mouth seem wider and the face more square. There has also been a significant amount of cosmetic retouching to make the facial features more defined, the lips fuller, the pupils larger and more limpid. In effect, she has had a make-over as good as any modern-day cover girl.

It would be interesting to find out when this enhancement took place. Although Victorian portrait studios employed retouchers to correct blurry eyeballs and remove disfigurements, I suspect that we are looking at a more recent attempt to glamourise this remarkable woman whose fame rests after all on her deeds rather than her looks.

While the manipulation of this particular photograph is clearly not something to get too bothered about, it does suggest that there may be ethical issues concerning the veracity of nineteenth century photographs as they are used by the mass-media today. The great power and strength of photography for the Victorians was its ability to hold up a mirror to the world and record what it reflected with utter truthfulness. It is a pity if we are to see such honesty treated too casually.