volume 19-01, may 2019 floating flora...
TRANSCRIPT
PHSC NEWSEditor - Sonja Pushchak
Distribution - David BridgeContributors - David Bridge,
Louise Freyburger, John Morden
IN THIS ISSUEFloating Flora.........................1
PHSC Presents .....................2
Exposure Secrets ..................3
Spring Camera Fair ..............4
Equipment .............................5
CONTACT Headliner.............6
WebLinks ...............................7
PHSC Events ........................8
Vi And Dot .............................9
Classifieds ...........................10
VOLUME 19-01 , May 2019
Pictured above: The Cherry Portable, the firstportable Japanese camera, was made by
Konishi Co. (now Konica) in 1903. The cameraused a magazine which held twelve 2¼” x 3¼”dry plates. Only sheet film and glass platescould be obtained in Japan at the time; rollfilms were imported, very expensive and
usually in poor condition without refrigeratedcargo holds. No surviving example of theCherry No.1 has ever surfaced. This replica
was made by Konica in the 1970s. Image fromthe Japan Camera Museum.
In seventeenth-century Japan,centuries of war were brought to aclose by the Tokugawa shogunate,which settled the peace but sealedthe country from foreign contactand influence. Tokyo (Edo),destroyed by fire in 1657, was rebuiltand the construction boom putmoney in the hands of merchants,craftsmen and labourers. In theprocess, the Yoshiwara pleasurequarter was relocated to acompound of neatly-built housessurrounded by discreet walls. Therethe “stars” of the Yoshiwara:courtesans and Kabuki actors,mingled with samurai, aristocrats
and monied commoners. As an isolated Japan could look only inward, thecontinual pursuit of beauty and pleasure became a major diversion.
Denied any role in the country’s governance and caught up in a culturalquarantine, the people of Edo immersed themselves in the arts. Known as theFloating World, it had the pleasure quarter as its centre but woodblock artistsspread interest in its illustrious figures by turning out prints to sell in the markets.Flowers often dressed images of courtesans but it wasn’t until Hokusai andHiroshige worked the medium in thenineteenth century that prints featuredflowers alone.
Photographic techniques andprocesses mastered by the Japanesewere eventually turned to replicatingthe subjects of the woodblock print.Ogawa Kazumasa (1860-1929) hiredon as a sailor aboard the USS Swatara,learned his craft in Boston andPhiladelphia, and returned to Japan toset up a studio specializing in themeticulous collotype process. Abreathtaking collection of his hand-coloured photographs wereassembled in the 1896 book SomeJapanese Flowers. Reprints ofKazumasa’s book or individual imagesare available at Public Domain Reviewor at the link below:publicdomainreview.org/collections/ogawa-kazumasas-hand-coloured-flower-collotypes-1896/
FLOATING FLORA
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PHSC NEWS May, 2019
Join us at 7:45pm, main speaker at 8:00pm, on Wednesday, May 15 in the Burgundy Room of Memorial Hall in thebasement of 5120 Yonge St, North York, Ontario for these informative presentations. Admission, as usual, is free and lightrefreshments are provided. Need info? www.phsc.ca
Film archivist and collector Terry Lagler’s love of film dates back to his childhood when his parents shot home movies todocument family life. This inspired him to produce Super 8 epics in the early 1980s. After spending time at Humber Collegein Film & TV Production / Creative Cinematography, he did time as a photo-lab manager at Black’s where he literally handledmiles of 35mm film. Years of collecting 8mm digests, finding and saving abandoned and neglected film, and restoring vintageequipment and projectors led to the founding of the Terry Lagler Filmshows in 2007. Terry hosts and curates a Home MovieDay at the Whitby Public Library, his “Backyard Theater” has been a popular community event since 2007 and he features aHalloween Horrorama every October 31st on his front porch.
Photographer Louie Palu presents images, video and several of his alternative publications to challenge older narrativesof war and conflict in the photographic record. He has extensive experience covering global hostilities including wars inAfghanistan and Ukraine, as well as the Mexican drug war.
Palu is a 2016-17 John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellow and a Harry Ransom Center Research Fellow in theHumanities. He is a current board member of the Frontline Freelance Register, an organization that advocates for freelancers’rights and safety. His work has been published in National Geographic Magazine and exhibited widely at the National Galleryof Canada, Boston Museum of Fine Arts, and the Munich Documentary Film Festival. Well-known for examining socio-politicalissues such as human rights and poverty, more can be seen on his website www.louiepalu.com
Photography, War and Alternative Narratives
The Golden Age of Super 8 and the Humble HomeMovie
PHSC PRESENTS
Afghanistan, photo by© Louie Palu
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PHSC NEWS May, 2019
EXPOSURE SECRETS BY SONJA PUSHCHAK
From Le Gray toWesterns toMadMax: Fury Road
As meteorological photography grew in importance innineteenth-century image-making, with images of lightningand eclipses amazing scientists and the public, it must havedriven Victorian photographers nuts to be unable to capturecloud-filled skies and properly-exposed landscapes together.Whatever timing worked for revealing the lush detail of thecountryside proved too much for the sky, which always cameback boringly blank and lacking its fleecy clouds. Becauseearly photo-sensitive solutions were orthochromatic, tendingtoward blue sensitivity, exposing for land was always goingto mean too much exposure for defining sky. The firstpractitioner to solve the problem had to resort to darkroomsubterfuge. French photographer Gustav Le Gray (1820-1884) worked around the problem by exposing two plates,one with the sky drastically under-exposed, allowing evenblue-sensitive plates to pick up cloud formations, the otherexposed to illuminate ground. Snapping the glass plates atthe horizon, he printed the desired portions together, addinghand-painted detail to fill any gap between the abuttedpieces. The now seamlessly combined print presented theviewer with a landscape as ideal as any that could beobserved by unaided human sight.
We tend to think that by the time the movie industry wasflourishing in the twentieth century the issue was a distantmemory. But this problem actually persisted. Early motionpicture film was also orthochromatic but films shot within astudio setting could control light levels, modifying the darkskin tones that blue sensitivity created with makeup.However, early westerns were a sticking point: directors werefrustrated at being unable to film cattle moving across theplains against the requisite wide blue yonder. Movie studioscomplained to the largest film company of the day, soEastman Kodak created a special-order panchromatic filmthat was sensitive to the broader colour spectrum. The firstfilm to use it was the fondly forgettable The HeadlessHorseman (1922). The film’s expense, due to the proprietaryhold Kodak had on the patent, caused Hollywood to hold offfrom using it with any great frequency. As late as 1929, TheVirginian starring Gary Cooper was still using ortho film withits telltale blown-out prairie skies. But by the next wave ofcowboy pictures in the late thirties, other companies came
up with panchromatic formulas. Clouds, so long out of reach,became commonplace in panoramic outdoor scenes.
Exposure problems solved? Not quite. Hollywood had arelated problem with shooting night scenes. Until the latetwentieth century, movie film definitely lacked the sensitivitynecessary for low-light conditions. Even after film chemistryimproved, the lighting equipment and manpower required fornight shots added exorbitant cost to already expensivemovie schedules. The answer was more trickery.Cinematographers filmed night scenes during the day andunderexposed in camera or used red filters over the lens.When developed, the rushes showed actors moving about inthe dark just as the script demanded. When did this practicefall out of favour? It didn’t. A variation was used as recentlyas Mad Max: Fury Road (2015). This time the digital film wasover-exposed, then darkened and tinted blue in post-production. That way the director got detail in the shadowsnormally lost in any under-exposure technique.
Sources“What is Panchromatic and Orthochromatic Film” by LeslieLazenbyfilmphotographyproject.com/content/howto/2018/07/panchromatic-orthochromatic-film/“A graphic tale: the visual effects of Mad Max: Fury Road” by IanFailes www.fxguide.com/featured/a-graphic-tale-the-visual-effects-of-mad-max-fury-road/Photography: A Cultural History by Mary Warner Marien (2002)
Night shot from Fury Road (2015).
MerMéditerranée at Sète by Gustave Le Gray, 1857, a printmadewith two glass negatives; blank sky from The Virginian (1929)with Gary Cooper, and the sky begins to open upwith Stagecoach (1939) starring JohnWayne.
Photographic Historical Society of Canada presents
SPRINGCAMERAFAIRNorth America’s Largest
Sunday, May 26, 2019TRIDENTHALL
145 Evans Avenue, Toronto(south of the Gardiner, east of Islington Avenue)
10:00am to 3:00pmAdmission $7 / Students free / Free parkingTTC via the South 110 Islington Bus
Mark Singer - [email protected]
Details at www.phsc.ca
...film, books,mags, images,postcards andmore......darkroom stuff...
Antique, vintage,collectible, noveltyand digital cameras,lenses, tripods...
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PHSC NEWS May, 2019
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PHSC NEWS May, 2019
EQUIPMENT REVIEW BY DAVID BRIDGE
Ilford HP5+ 4x5 negatives scannedwith a DSLR somewhere in Northern Florida.
Taking 4 X 5 on the Road and intoMotel Sinks
The kitchen lab,left to right: unpackingthe kit, Paterson tankwithMod 54 inside
(centre) and“clothesline” in tote box.
In sincere appreciation of our own previous article ondeveloping 4x5 without a darkroom, we set out for our PHSCLabs southern outpost to validate to ourselves that 4x5 filmcould, indeed, be taken on the road and made to produceimages. Any student of photo-help magazines orphotographers from the last century will have heard manytales of in-motel development. But with change-bag, Mod 54developing reel and a DSLR we wanted to update and relivethis process.
So after a few clumsy exposures with our trusty CrownGraphic (dark cloth, tripod etc. produced no remarks fromseniors’ community bystanders), and more than a fewsweaty moments fumbling film holders, film, reel and tankinside the change-bag, we were ready for the processing.
Fearing nasty interrogation by the Federal BorderWelcome agents, we packed only some powder developer,and a small bottle of fix. For anyone accustomed to blendingarctic Canadian tap water with some from the hot waterspout, Florida’s stable 72 degree cold water was a blessingas it could be used straight from the tap. No fancy hypoeliminator or wetting agent was used.
A “clothesline” and clips had already been installed inthe tote box, allowing just enough room for film dryingwithout being imprinted with the flying fauna of Florida.Although perhaps a bit of a digital cheat, our driedmasterpieces were scanned using the DSLR/tablet-backlight technique also described in our earlier article.Rise, tilt and swing still lives in the south!
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PHSC NEWS May, 2019
The AxiomaticMoment of CarrieMaeWeemsCONTACT HEADLINER
Carrie Mae Weems (1953- ) is this year’s keynote jewelat CONTACT. If you’re in downtown Toronto, you’ll havetrouble missing her installations at Metro Hall, Bell Lightboxor 80 Spadina Avenue. An American artist and activist,Weems pursued an arts education at the California Instituteof the Arts and the University of California, and worked in thelabour movement as an union organizer. Merging her love ofhuman justice with the image, she formed part of thephotographic community inhabited by luminaries RoyDeCarava and Dawoud Bey. Her work has targeted some ofthe more complex questions behind the black experience:the oppression of women, social misdirection, theconsequences of power, and conventional notions of beauty,race and gender.
If you haven’t seen a lot of Weems’s work before now,one might almost call its presence at CONTACT a sort ofcelebratory retrospective. The installation at CONTACTGallery (80 Spadina Avenue, Suite 205) brings togetherpieces conceived between the early 90s and 2018 thatprotest the misapprehension of the meaning of colour. Herphotographs of black subjects, arranged in a grid withframed panels of random hues, illustrate how arbitrarilybiased judgment on the basis of skin colour is. The All theBoys series also makes use of colour but as a sign of thedismal future in which opportunity is withheld for youngblack men. Displaying out-of-focus youth in a melancholyblue cast, Weems points to an ongoing exclusion from socialprosperity and the more-than-likely destiny of many ascasualties of white violence. And Anointed, with Mary J. Bligebathed in a blood-red glow, speaks to the costs of successfor women of colour.
While Weems has certainly generated a career’s worthof respectable photography, she knows that contemporaryproblems for the black community are often obscured by thedifficulties in peeling historical events apart. The slaveryeconomy that powered Western growth is often seen as theculprit, but is only part of the story. When slavery wasabolished, factory owners devised a cunning strategy tokeep paid wages low. They pitted the most recent wave ofimmigrants, the Irish, against recently-freed slaves. Whenasked for better pay, black men were threatened withreplacement by immigrants. When immigrants asked, theywere threatened with replacement by freemen. Thus eachgroup was misdirected to see the other as enemy, whileemployers continued to mistreat and underpay withimpunity. This practice continues today. The next timesomeone tells you society’s problem is the black communityor immigration, realize, like Weems, that the problem existswith who is doing the misdirecting.
Details on CONTACT exhibitions can be found atscotiabankcontactphoto.com
All the Boys (Blocked 2), 2016 (printed 2019)by CarrieMaeWeems.
Anointed by CarrieMaeWeems, 2017.
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PHSC NEWS May, 2019
WEB LINKS COMPILED BY LOUISE FREYBURGER
Rare Photos of Hitler from Glass Plates by His PersonalPhotographer, by Michael Zhang, Petapixel, April 23,2019
petapixel.com/2019/04/23/rare-photos-of-hitler-from-glass-plates-by-his-personal-photographer/Hitler’s personal photographer, Heinrich Hoffmann, was oneof the infamous dictator’s primary propagandists, and tensof thousands of the photographer’s photos exist on glassplate negatives. Now a large number of those rare photos arebeing revealed with a new level of clarity through adigitization effort by the National Archives.The Washington Post reports that 1,300 Hoffmann glassplates have been digitized out of a trove of about 41,000plates.
Portrait of a Marriage: Julia Child Captured in Paul Child’sShimmering Photographs, By Cynthia Zarin, New Yorker PhotoBooth, December 2, 2017
www.newyorker.com/culture/photo-booth/portrait-of-a-marriage-julia-child-captured-in-paul-childs-shimmering-photographs?fbclid=IwAR0qneswo9Ms7bgAhUerMIGbsv9z39tY8x72GUEn4m_RSht3kbds09itElsOne of the most significant meals of the last century occurred almostseventy years ago, on November 3, 1948, when Paul and Julia Child, twoyears wed, arrived in Le Havre on the S.S. America from New York. Theywere on their way to Paris: Paul Child, a career civil servant, had beenoffered a job as an exhibits officer for the United States InformationService, a now defunct division of the State Department. Their baggageincluded a Buick station wagon, nicknamed “The Blue Flash.” They packedthemselves into the car and drove south to Rouen, where Julia Child ate herfirst French meal, at La Couronne, then the oldest restaurant in France.Paul ordered the meal: oysters, followed by sole meunière, salade verte,wine, fromage blanc, and black coffee. Julia Child would later say, “It wasthe most important meal of my life.” From then on, she was all in.
The artistry behind protecting and repairingphotographs, by Jeffrey Brown, PBS News Hour,Mar. 4, 2019
www.pbs.org/newshour/show/the-artistry-behind-p r o t e c t i n g - a n d - r e p a i r i n g -p h o t o g ra p h s ? f b c l i d = I w A R 0 l x n _ l 0 Q F P t 9 m 4 -3YZ5VFT8uizFtrx6mDWJA_o4iPKRa8RJm9L-AsnaysAt the Art Institute of Chicago, staff rely on state-of-the-art technology and sophisticated conservationmethods, including a massive cold-storage facility, toensure that the collection of more than 24,000photographs is preserved. A current museum exhibitteaches visitors how that conservation process worksto protect and restore what can cannot be replaced.
SPECIAL EVENT:KODAk CANADA: THE EARLY YEARS(1898-1938)SPECIAL DATE & TIME - January 23, 2019, 6 to 8pmSPECIAL L O CATION - RYERSON IMAGE CENTRE,33 Gould St, Toronto, ONJoin us for the opening of the Masters Exhibition at theRyerson Student Gallery, sponsored by the PHSC.
SNAKE CHARMER WITH A CAMERAFebruary 20, 2019Erin Levitsky, winner of the 2018 Thesis Prize Award, willpresent selections from her research on twentieth-centuryfashion and advertising photographer Nina Leen.
JAPANESE PHOTOGRAPHY &VIDEO EDITING: FROM BLAH TO BRILLIANTMarch 20, 2019Japan has had a deep, dedicated and complex relationshipwith photography and its technology. Celio Barreto willreveal some its intriguing history and contributions in rarelyseen images. Speaker Mark Holtze will also be in to discussthe ins and outs of creating a tight instructional video.
PREVENTIVE CONSERVATIONFOR PHOTOGRAPHSApril 17, 2019Chloé Lucas answers your questions.
PHOTOGRAPHY, WAR AND ALTERNATIVENARRATIVES&THE GOLDEN AGE OF SUPER 8 ANDTHE HUMBLE HOME MOVIEMay 15, 2019Louie Palu is a Canadian documentary photographer andfilmmaker known for covering social-political issues,including war and human rights. On the same night, anintroductory presentation byTerry Lagler on Super 8 (cinefilm).
WORLD WAR ONE TRAININGIN PHOTOGRAPHSJune 19, 2019Erin Gregory, an Assistant Curator at the Canada Aviationand Space Museum, expands on what is known about theWWI photographic record.
PHSC PRESENTS IS ON VACATIONFOR JULY AND AUGUST
SPRING FAIRSunday, May 26, 2019
TRIDENT HALL
145 Evans Avenue, Toronto(south of the Gardiner,
east of Islington Avenue)10:00am to 3:00pm
Admission $7 / Students free / Free parkingMark Singer - Chairman - [email protected]
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PHSC NEWS May, 2019
Our talks are free and open to the public on the third Wednesday of every month, from September toJune, in the Burgundy Room of the Memorial Hall, in the basement of 5120 Yonge St, North York,Ontario. Guest speaker appears at 8:00 pm unless otherwise specified. Some of the presentationsare tentative and subject to change.
PHSC PRESENTS
PHSC EVENTST R U N K S A L E
ALL SELLERS AND BUYERS WELCOME !Sunday, July 14, 2019
TRIDENT HALL 145 Evans Avenue, Toronto(south of the Gardiner, east of Islington Avenue)8:00am to 1:00pm - Free admission & parkingClint Hryhorijiw - Chairman - [email protected]
Details at www.phsc.ca
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PHSC NEWS May, 2019
Dot: Violet, dear sister, I’ve been wondering about the sourceof the absolute madness around having a photograph ofoneself in every possible moment? Didn’t we used to seeportraits as something special; one-offs to pass down to thegreat-grand off-spawn?
Vi: Dot, because the vast majority of Victorians were poor,employed in subsistence domestic labour positions, the costof studio portraits was naturally beyond many of them. Or ifthey saved up, they sat for one cherished image. That likelypromoted the photographed portrait as somewhat of a rarityfor a while. But as photography changed from a serviceoffered by small business professionals with independentstudios to an industry based on continual growth andprofitability, the age of consumer photography dawned.
Dot: Are we talking about Eastman Kodak?
Vi: Yes. Kodak thought it had the formula for continualgrowth: manufacture simple cameras that took cheap filmconsumers sent away to process. People suddenly couldendlessly record personal lives. What Kodak was selling wasimmediacy: photos any time. And it thought it would sell newcameras and new film to those same people indefinitelybecause people hate to be seen using outmoded things. Itseemed like one glorious golden goose.
Dot: So, was it?
Vi: For a time. But there was something that Kodak hadn’tfigured: saturation. Kodak kept manufacturing its cameras
but so did other companies. When those niches seemedfilled, thinking eventually moved to selling photographs topeople who wouldn’t go to studios and didn’t own cameras.The automatic photo booth was born. The first booth wasinstalled in the Paris Exhibition of 1889, then five were put onthe streets of Paris in 1928. The Photomaton Societythought they could profit through rights for the device butimitators managed their own versions. Profits plummetedfor all, just like with cameras and film.
Dot: Will the photo industry decide to slow it down?
Vi: I think that the industry can’t resist enabling its ownredundancy. I predict that someday someone will come upwith film-less cameras, which will wound the film industry.Then somebody will come up with a gadget that does awhole lot of things at once, taking pictures among them, andthat will hobble the camera industry. Immediacy, saturationand redundancy: the 3 horsemen of photography.
Dot: Should I be selling my Kodak stock?
SourcesThe New History of Photography by Michel Frizot (1998)
Womanwith Brownie, c1934.
Automatic Photo Booth, 1928.
VI AND DOTRake over the 3 horsemenof photography.
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PHSC NEWS May, 2019
THE CLASSIFIEDSExhibitions Exhibitions
DON NEWLANDS: 1960’sRETROSPECTIVEMay 2 - May 15, 2019ARTA Gallery, Distillery District14 Distillery Lane, Toronto, ONwww.KlixPix.comMaclean’s photojournalist DonNewlands tirelessly photographedmid-century cultural life in Canada.One of the little known collections ofsocial documentary of the swinging60s. Curated by Dolores Gubasta.
Wanted
Publications
The latest Graflex Journal is availablefor download at journal.graflex.org.Plus ongoing calls for articles and forcontemporary photography utilizingGraflex cameras. Contact Ken Metcalfat [email protected]
Fixed in Time by Sean Nolan is is aguide to dating daguerreotypes,ambrotypes and tintypes by theirmats and cases. For historians,genealogists, collectors and dealers.An errata sheet of corrections isavailable If you have a printed copy,or if you have the free PDF, you canpick up an updated version. Both at:fixedintimebook.blogspot.com/
Portraits of Digital CanadaApril 24 to Sept 30, 2019York University's Scott Library,Main FloorAn exhibit featuring a selection ofportraits from the IBM CanadaImages Archive. The majority weretaken by award-winning photographerGeorge Dunbar, tasked withdocumenting the company’scorporate life. A remarkablecollection that relives the budding ofthe information age. Free admission.A catalog can be viewed at:www.cs.yorku.ca/museum/PortraitsOfDigitalCanada.pdf
SARAH ANNE JOHNSON:THIS LANDMay 4, 2019 – June 16, 2019Stephen Bulger Gallery1365 Dundas Street, Toronto, ONwww.bulgergallery.com/exhibitions/35-sarah-anne-johnson-this-land/overview/This exhibition with work from two ofJohnson’s series, continues tochronicle her fascination regardinghuman impact on and interaction witha changing environment.
Toronto historian/collector seeksassistance in locating original imagesand/or written documentation orcorrespondence in or for The Ward(formerly St.John’s Ward) aneighbourhood in central Toronto,(formerly the area now occupied byToronto City Hall) in the 19th andearly 20th centuries. To be compiledfor a history project about life in TheWard.
Please contact Vic Caratun [email protected].
LOOKING FOR IN-DEPTHARTICLES ON CANADIANPHOTOGRAPHICHISTORY?
Then look to PhotographicCanadiana. Published four times ayear, focusing on photographichistory with a Canadian emphasis,it is one of the benefits of a PHSCmembership. Join today! Paypalaccepted.Information at www.phsc.ca