(16th April continued)
Just before the project described above, I managed to negotiate entry into the empty library building I mentioned in my previous post. I spent a weekend hanging my dresses and photographing them and the rest of the interior with my Brownie and borrowed Lubitel, with the help of a friend. I'm pretty pleased with the results (see images attached to post) and also very glad that I gave up on using a digital camera in the first half hour of shooting. I've gotten so used to using a digital camera to document my work, taking loads of shots with varying exposures to get documentation right and checking them immediately, that it felt incredibly liberating not to have to do this. The two cameras I've got are much less accurate – the Brownie leaks quite a bit of light and you've got to work out the exposures (of anything from 2 seconds to five minutes) by referring to chart in the manual I downloaded. The Lubitel is more accurate, but a bit of guesswork is required to get the shot lined up as the viewfinder is through the second lens and it's completely manual, so I've been teaching myself all about handheld light meters and reflective and incident readings.
But not knowing exactly what the shots were going to be like was great. They feel rougher, less precise and I like it where the exposures are out a bit or the shot isn't lined up that well. Everything feels less clinical, less ‘perfect' and I like that. I'm intending to print some of these photographs onto old paper bags, old carrier bags and patterns of the dresses, cut out of pattern paper. The idea is that the photograph becomes an object, and that the material qualities of the support of conceptually relevant to the photographs and the dresses themselves. That's why I'm interested in using quite low value objects, cheap everyday stuff, which has perhaps had another use…. I want to be able to explain or ‘justify' this further, but I'm aware that this could easily become an overly intellectual exercise, and that some of these answers will come about by my making / using the objects and materials.
(continues….)
