bwfilmphotography

My Nobel Peace Prize Winners

TutuCarter

In the 1980’s I spent about 8 years in Atlanta at Emory University doing doctoral work in the Division of Religion. It’s where I got deeply involved in photography. I was using 35mm exclusively for awhile but then an old photographer suggested I get a Speed Graphic, a “real Camera”, and I found a 4X5 Crown at KEH, which still had a walk-in store. As my photo work progressed I got some kind of reputation among some of the faculty, and when the Religion Department sponsored a small conference with former President Jimmy Carter and Desmond Tutu I was asked to make some photographs. The former President was in the library I worked in fairly often as his presidential library was located in the Special Collections area. I was teaching a religion class in the college at the time and had heard a couple students during a break talking about the “Bishop’s daughter”, another student in the class. I asked “Which bishop?” and they said, “You know, Tutu!” Well, I hadn’t known but when the department chair asked me to go fetch the Bishop across campus and bring him to the conference I did, and mentioned to him that I had taught his daughter in the now finished class. He got a bit excited and grabbed my hand. “She loved that class!” he said, which was kind of cool for me, as you can imagine.

So we went upstairs to the conference and Jimmy Carter was there with men in dark suits and wires in their ears and the two Nobel Prize winners embraced with big smiles and chatted like old school roommates. That’s how this photo came to be. I was using a Minolta 101 if I recall. Tutu had been a warm and funny companion as we walked across campus. The President though, at one point, gave me a cross look as he sat at the conference table. Being a strict amateur I think I was taking too many photos and so I backed off and sat with the faculty and he relaxed his next gaze in my direction.

The negatives turned out well and I made a contact print and some 8X10s for the Religion department and kept a contact print for myself. After getting the doctorate I moved to the Pacific Northwest where the air is dry and it is cool at night in the Summertime. And the first Winter my cabin in the woods burned down and destroyed my entire stash of 35mm negatives plus all my equipment and everything else the family owned except what we had put into a storage unit. Later on I found I still had the contact print.

Nearly thirty years later, while working at Gonzaga University, I learned that Desmond Tutu was coming to do the commencement address and I told the story of my photo to some colleagues who spread it around and I was invited to photograph him again, in a meeting with students. Kathy had previously dug out the contact sheet and scanned it, and got a nice copy of the photo from the scan, which we framed. Later on I found one 8X10 print from the original negative. Kathy went with me to the event as a second photographer and I was invited to present the Bishop with the framed photo. He had never seen it. He was excited again, and again warm and funny. He noted that he looked a bit different now and that I didn’t look the same either. He told me that he had driven Jimmy Carter to an emergency room in South Africa when the President broke his leg on a house project. They were still fast friends. The Bishop treasured the photograph, and took it home in his carry on luggage because he didn’t want anything to happen to it. And that’s my story of photographing 2 Nobel Peace Prize Laureates.

Bill Kostelec

January 24, 2018

Using a Fungussy Lens

Using a Fungussy Lens

I have a Canon screw mount lens from the early 1950s. It’s a Serenar 50mm f 1.8 in a shiny bright chrome mount. It came on my Canon III. It has a fungus on an internal lens element. My camera tech did not want to disassemble as far as it would have taken to get to the fungus, so we let it go. This is a lens with a very good reputation. It was created fast, sharp and contrasty. It still is.

The coating on the front and rear elements is in nearly perfect shape on the Serenar and I have used it happily from time to time. Still, it has a fungus. The other day Kathy and I went downtown Spokane to photograph the MLK Day march. It was cold, but bright and sunny. I decided to take two cameras, a Minolta SRT 201 with a 135 Rokkor, and my M3, with appropriate adaptor and the Canon Serenar. I wanted to see just what I could get out of the fungus, afflicted lens in bright, contrasty light.

I shot two rolls of film through it, a 24 exposure roll each of TriX and TMAX 100. Most of the exposures were made at f11 or between f8 and f11. The fungus is translucent and it is off center. The set up area for the march was at the Convention Center with its high and brilliant white block long wall that faced the late morning sun directly. People standing up against or close to the wall threw distinct and sharp shadows behind them and the light made for some very interesting images. Figure no. 1 is of a lady dressed in black, just a couple a feet away from the wall. I was standing straight on and parallel to her and the white wall. At 1/250^th of a second between f8 and 11, the TriX negative is nice and sharp. When I printed the first copy of this I used a 3 ½ filter on Seagull VC fiber paper, and the first print was too light. What did reveal itself in this print was light from the wall behind subtly bleeding around the edges of the lady’s dark clothing and hat. Very subtly. I increased the print exposure by about 50% and got the good print, illustrated here. There is no sign of the flaring, no fog obscuring detail and I think of this as a successful exposure. Obviously the fungus had glowed in the brilliant wall light. My lens hood could not hold that back. Still, the quality of the negative is good and I printed without any burning or dodging.

FLARINGINMARCH

The second image is near the end of the march with a lot of brilliant backlighting. As my custom, I put myself into a shadow area, this time a multi story building whose roof just cut out the noontime Winter sky from the shot. Any light that could flare the fungus in the lens would have to come from the reflections off the street or windows or shiny objects on the marchers. In this case it was hair and pavement and a parked car. Here the effects of the fungus is more pronounced and there are several little bursts of white light on distant marchers where the sunlight backlit hair. The shadows and light on the pavement was very striking in reality and the fungus I think tended to emphasize that in a very pleasant way. If I’d used my Summicron 50mm instead perhaps the backlighting would have been cleaner and more controlled but I am really happy with the fungal glow.

So what is the lesson here? My Dad told me a long time ago, “Don’t throw it away. You could use it someday!” I learned my lesson. A photographer’s equipment does not have to be perfect, nor new. It just has to be used properly, and at the appropriate time. So, make some pictures.

Bill Kostelec

Processing Film and the Good Life

The Good Life of Processing Film

The other evening, Kathy processed her first 8X10 negs in my BTZS tubes. She had processed 8 X 10 in a tray before but I was the only one using the tubes. It was also her first time shooting the 8X10 Eastman Commercial View Camera that I spent a lot of hours getting into shooting condition last year.

She was amazed at her negatives. We did the first two at 6 minutes in Xtol at 72 degrees, thinking that we could alter the time for the duplicate negs if necessary. It wasn’t. The next afternoon she made contact prints on a Foma contact printing paper and now apparently, I am going to have to find a hiding place to stash at least some of our 8X10 film!

My favorite format for sheet film negatives is 5X7. As I have always enjoyed framing and shooting 35mm film, the aspect ratio of 5X7 seems ideal to me. It is a lot like 35mm in that way. Having a working Beseler 5X7 enlarger with a cold light head also helps to add value to that format. Still, when we want to produce a large body of work, as in last Fall’s trip to the Eastern Sierra, we both shoot a lot of 4X5 and medium format. Film processing, as well as cost, contributes to that choice. We both process 4X5 in restaurant trays, used for, I suppose keeping food hot, a brilliant innovation that Alan Ross showed us a year or so ago. We used to use hangars in Kodak rubber tanks. It is an easy and nearly foolproof method and being very hands on, also satisfying. 8X10 and 5X7 film has been more problematic and the acquisition of the BTZS tubes was, and Kathy will now allow me to say this, a rather good move on my part.

I enjoy processing film more than I enjoy printing. The moment a negative first comes into the light is like (well not quite) when the newborn baby first is wheeled into the room. There it is, full of potential, full of promise and hope! (I’m not sure if I’m talking about the baby or the negative. Sometimes I get carried away!)

In any case, whenever I use the digital camera to make an image, the act seems so prematurely done, and so incomplete in a way that I find very unsatisfying. Sitting at a computer just doesn’t feel like a photographic activity to me, partly because of too many years in a sedentary sitting at the computer job. Processing film, on the other hand, makes me smile and hanging negatives to dry and going into the house, where Kathy inevitably asks, “How do they look?” is what I call, “the good life.”

Bill Kostelec

Some Photo History Questions

Photo History Myths and Legends; Part 1

If I had not gone astray and become a theologian, I think I might have ended up an historian, as the interest I nurtured beginning with my learning to read has continued all these long years. As a film photographer, my historical bent leads me to a fairly small set of “histories of photography” and an even smaller set of collected writings on photography and/or by photographers. Then there are publications dedicated to the work of single photographers or perhaps small groups who in their author’s mind constituted a school or movement. Some of the newer works have displayed a nice humility in understanding by referring to themselves as “a” history rather than “the” history. A big book edited by Michel Frizot, with many European contributors, published in English in 1999 is called “A New History of Photography” while the American publication from 2000 by Robert Hirsch is titled “Seizing the Light, A History of Photography.”

I appreciate such humility. History itself is an ever evolving study. The history of photography is relatively short, even when one takes into account the discoveries and experiments that happened before the fateful year 1839. In my mind the historical significance of photography far outweighs its relatively short time of existence. It is not the technological history though that has such weight, but rather the sociological history of photography’s impact on the world. Marxist critics like Walter Benjamin, doomed to die in a Nazi concentration camp, and feminist critic Susan Sontag, have contributed to an enrichment of understanding of the way photography has both reflected social realities and impacted them. Social realities also impact the way histories are written, the way historians look at the sources.

That’s part of my reason for starting this series on photo history. It will be more like a reflection on the histories we have about a technological development that transformed the world in some very profound ways.

History and biography intersect, but history is definitely the attempt at a bigger picture. Take, for example, the story of the Frenchman, Eugene Atget. That he died in relative obscurity in 1927 means that there really is no biography of Atget. Before anyone thought of writing one, those that might have contributed something to a biography were gone. He left no writings outlining his approach to picture-making, nor formulas for plate processing or printing. There are no Atget “Daybooks” as there are for Edward Weston, no partisan essays as one finds for Paul Strand. Of those who knew him and wrote of it, there is Berenice Abbott who knew him briefly and admired his work to the point of rescuing it after the man had died, and there is Man Ray, who used an Atget image in a surrealist magazine, and who later in life expressed a lingering resentment for the interest and adulation the dead Frenchman had acquired, and scoffed that Atget had no artistic self awareness.

That interest and adulation is where history kicks in and biography drops off. What happened with Atget is that at a time when Modernism had grabbed the attention of artists of all sorts, (and the Catholic Church!) the work of Atget was finding an audience, through the efforts of Berenice Abbott especially, and young photographers were finding in the images a sense of direction and a sort of purification of photographic seeing. This was true of, for example, the young American Walker Evans, soon to become a significant figure in 20^th century photography. So Atget IS significant because of the impact his work had on later photographers who became significant for even later photographers! Following the lead of Walker Evans was the 1950s photographic work of Robert Frank, whose book “The Americans”, in turn, influenced the work of Garry Winograd, Lee Friedlander and the like. You see how influence spreads? And we then, at some point make that chain of influence and significance into what we call history.

Bill Kostelec

Note: If you want to see Atget’s work at its best, look for reproductions that preserve the beautiful colors of his original prints. They were made on printing out paper and toned in gold. Straight black ink reproductions lose much of the emotional impact of Atget’s work.

Old Equipment: New Images

In a culture that is economically driven by consumerism, we are impressed with the notion that new stuff is better than old stuff. Get rid of that iphone 4 and get the new, improved iphone 8! Your Hybrid Toyota is 8 years old! Get a loan and buy the 2018 model! Sell off your old film camera equipment and get a new Canon digital with 10 gazillion megapixels! I’ve been, I confess without shame, regularly out of step culturally for most of my life, and so with photography and its tools.

We had our annual Holiday Open House the first weekend of January, where Kathy and I make nearly our whole house a gallery space, cook up some spiced wine, and invite folks in over three days to hang out, look at the prints either framed on the walls or in sleeves in racks. It’s a lot of work but a lot of fun. During that weekend a man who in the Spring is going to take a workshop with us handed Kathy a cardboard box with “some old film camera junk”. I didn’t get a chance to look it until Sunday evening. There were a couple small foldable flashbulb units, some bulbs, a couple odd 35mm cameras, a light meter labeled TOWER and one brown leather case that proved to hold an AGFA Karat 36, a rangefinder folding 35mm camera, made in Germany in about 1951. With it was an instruction manual.

In such situations my response is to get out a few basic cleaning materials, canned air, Pec12, micro fiber cleaning cloth, and so on, and while cleaning, check things out. I get the back open, check the shutter, move the aperture, and in the process get a better idea of what I have. The next step is to load with film and shoot. This I did the next day on a 2 mile walk with my friend Jerry. Then to home, to the darkroom, process the roll. When the film comes out of the photo-flo distilled water bath I hang it up, turn on the light box hanging flush on the wall and look over negatives with a loupe. Now I know much better what I have.

There is a sense of satisfaction when I find good negatives, on several levels. First, if the camera has worked properly that is good. It becomes a user and I enjoy using older cameras. The second level is just that; the satisfaction of using equipment as old as or older than me. This second kind of satisfaction is one way that I refute and reject that cultural norm that we must use the newest to do good work. It’s simply not true. The third level of satisfaction is making good images in this antique process of shooting and processing film. When I developed my first roll of black and white film, (Verichrome Pan 616) at 11 years old, and had my first look at the negatives in the light, I got the same thrill that I get now when I pull a roll out of the photo flo.

A friend of ours pulled out a big brown leather bag a while back to show us her Dad’s old camera. It is an EXAKTA V, sold about 1951 as well, with three lenses, a nice GE Golden Crown light meter and again, a good instruction manual. Holding it up and looking through the 58mm Zeiss lens was a disappointment. The image was dark, and dirty with just one clear circle at the center. She wanted me to try it out. I took it home and pulled the removable viewfinder. The mirror was yellow and brown with places of missing silver. A front surface mirror like this can be very bright but atmospheric acids and other pollutions had basically ruined it. Such a thing is an affront to my sense of the beauty of old equipment. I got on line, found someone selling an original equipment replacement mirror for a different version of the EXAKTA, a mirror that itself was probably 50 years old. I learned, however, that EXAKTA equipment tends to be interchangeable, and I ordered it even though my friend’s husband said “Aw, she’ll never use it.” When it arrived I did a little research online, found a suggestion, pulled the lens and lens mount and looked closely inside with a lens, figured out what teeny metal strips to bend, and I was able to pull the old mirror out and slip in the new, in about ten minutes.

Now both viewfinders are bright and clean and I am on the third roll of film with the old EXAKTA V.

During the Summer we do a couple outdoor Art Fairs. Our black and white prints turn out to be very rare and unusual at such events. A couple Summers back a lady was very interested as we had on display a print of the campus of Gonzaga University and she told me that her Uncle Leo had worked there long ago and that he was a photographer. “Leo Yates, S.J. ?” I guessed. “Yes!” So I told her I have one of his lens and shutters, a Protar VII convertible, in a Compound shutter. It probably dates before 1920 and I got it in a junk box full of old abandoned darkroom stuff. Only later did I trace it to the Jesuit. But this old lens and shutter has produced some of my best 5X7 negatives over the years. I had to have the cable release plug replaced once and sent it to a camera tech in California, Fred with a German accent who used to work on Ansel Adams’ equipment. Fred called me up and said, “Bill, I have been showing your lens to my assistant. Dis is a good vun. Let me go over the shutter and get everything good again.” So, of course, I did and that was maybe 12 years ago and it is still a good one. I used it to shoot Ektachrome 5X7s at a ghost town in Montana a few years back. No problem.

Old equipment is fun and often beautiful in itself. So often Kathy and I have had people stop us and admire our cameras. Modern lenses are multi-coated and so display more contrast and color saturation than our old ones , but that they are sharper than older lenses is questionable. I had to scan an original 8X10 silver print on matte paper of the first graduating class of Gonzaga University. The glass plate negative was long lost. On the monitor it seemed that the print was extremely well detailed and I made a 16X20 ink jet print from the file. The detailed texture from the brick work on the original Gonzaga College building was indeed incredibly detailed. The photo was made in about 1892 and I was working from a matte contact print. Whatever formula that lens was, it did its job very well. For us, the task is to use such equipment to the best of its ability and get good, printable negatives. And then, on to the first print of a new image.

Bill Kostelec