Like a crazy game of chess, my heroes glide around in my head on a multicoloured board of abstract devices.
Sally Mann moves like a silken knight to embrace David Hockney – Capa, Kim and Taro play hopscotch with Francis Bacon – Felix Tournachon goes ballooning with Suzanne Valadon and Dora Marr checkmates Picasso on a field of powdered glass.
But today, guiding my odyssey to an enchanted island – is Berenice Abbott. quote – “Photography can never grow up if it imitates some other medium. It has to walk alone; it has to be itself”.
Berenice started to develop ideas she called “Super Sight” or the “Abbott Process” in 1939. The concept is to produce large format negatives with an apparatus which combines elements of a camera obscura and an epidiascope. Then by “stacking” a series of exposures, create a larger than life negative on film which is then contact printed.
As large format film is very expensive and I wanted to make negatives up to 30 x 40 cm in size, I put together a contraption, based on notes I found about the Super Sight images, using scaffolding, 60 year old “Strobe” lights, two old process cameras and a dead fish. By using old Kodak photo paper as a negative material I tested this setup in July 2024.
The photo paper I used for the negative has a speed of about 2 iso and I wanted to use an aperture of at f64, as, for this first experiment, I would not be stacking the exposures and I wanted to see a useful depth of field, I calculated I needed about 100 kilo-joules of light (a lot). I was only using three strobe heads so I “popped” the lights 20 times. This was useful as I had not made the configuration with vibration-proof mounts and popping in the darkened room would emulate stacking exposures with a shutter – being able to use flash was a big advantage for me.
It worked –
My aim is to make colour images so, by testing with old, slow black and white paper for the negative I can assess the same technique for use with a carbon transfer process, but the thought of 100 kilo-joules of ultra-violet light is mind blowing – so my next step is to make the image with Fuji crystal paper and develop with a RA4 colour reversal process. Perhaps if I could strip the emulsion of the Fuji paper onto Polyester, I could have a 30 x 40 cm Ektachrome (dream on)?
I also have my last, unopened, 10 sheets of Ilfochrome (Cibachrome) 30 x 40 cm paper and the chemicals which I have been saving for 25 years in the hope of finding the right time to use it – so, is now the time?
After 60 years of working in moving pictures and still photography, I am sliding happily into the past by experimenting with techniques I was taught as a student of photography in the 1960s and ’70s. In an odd reversal of current media,.
My career seems like reverse processing, I came into the film industry from the first commercial computer digital research technology, and then from film into “still” photography in the 1970s. From helping to develop compiling languages in 1963 and using television displays on 10 x 8 Sinars in the late 1970s. Now, 60 years on I am slipping back into calotypes but using anamorphic lenses and oodles of strobe lighting.
I am riding down a helter-skelter of many old, “traditional” methods and materials by the forced redundancy and unnecessary complexity of films and papers and digital apparatus for cameras and printing.
Berenice Abbott had vision, was innovative and inventive, she fought and taught – when told by the New York Public Service Commission in the 1930s “what would a nice girl like you be doing in Brooklyn” she replied “I am not a nice girl, I am a photographer.
Tony Tidswell – 26 July 2024 – Montblanc