And, since many artists have friends, we had non-stop visitors to the facility who were, in many cases, both visually interesting and also more than happy to pose for ten or fifteen minutes for photographers who were practicing their techniques and creating the looks they wanted from their lighting and their lenses.
When I was making the transition, in 1987, from being an advertising creative director to working as a professional photographer I mostly used a 4x5 camera to do studio work but the trends were obvious; more and more people were working with medium format cameras and clients were perfectly happy with that.
I wanted to buy a complete Hasselblad system but I was too cheap to go for it. I thought I could do just as well with a couple of much less expensive Pentax 6 x 7 cm bodies and three used lenses. When it came to lighting I was using big 4x6 foot Lightform panels, putting a translucent (white nylon) cover on the panel facing the subject and then black panels with white sides on either side of the translucent panels. So the white reflective panels worked like the sides of a soft box to channel all the light to the subject while the black on the other side of the material killed the spill light into the room. The big "soft box" effect was my favorite style for the better part of a decade. Almost always, back then, done with big electronic flashes.
The image above was from one of the those early days. I was working in the studio trying to figure out how I was going to light someone for a project the next day. I walked out into the vast open hallways of our transformed warehouse just to take a break when I saw this person chatting down the hall with a friend. I got introduced and asked if she could spare ten minutes to stand in front of my camera and, happily, she was more than happy to do so.
It's a soft, quiet portrait and it's almost 40 years old but I still like the feel of it and the subject's quiet but confident expression. I have another copy as a 16x20 inch print that I subtly hand-colored for a gallery show and I still like that version as well.
It's fun to look back and see what we accomplished with our "primitive" cameras and materials so long ago. It puts more into context. It's also about a thread or a consistency of vision. I like that.
I did the same thing with a painting studio. It occurred to me (I'm too old to act on it now) that when you find a place that attracts artists, you should buy in, because it seems that they attract money, and after a few years your artist hangout turns into fern bars and coffee shops with $6 lattes. populated by moneyed wannabes.
ReplyDeleteI saw what John Camp describes in my former home town of Richmond, Virginia. Over the course of about fifty years the same pattern repeated itself. The artists would move into a dilapidated part of town, usually ones with lots of warehouses and abandoned manufacturing facilities, then small upgrades like diners, coffee shops, head shops, and art galleries would appear. Next would come conversions into apartments and condos and the artists would be squeezed out to another dilapidated section of town. I can think of five examples of this and now there are no such areas left for artists' hangouts. I actually invested in some of these, as John suggests, and did well every time. I had a lot of fun renovating and upgrading some of these places and it provided me with some retirement savings. It wasn't on the scale of the orange #47 but then again, I never went bankrupt.
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