[LRflex] Re: Old Slides

In response to my tyrade on 'ethics' in the digital darkroom, John 
Scocca wrote:
>Well, let me tell you a little tale.  Long ago, a friend of mine
>convinced me to take a photo course offered by the Baltimore Camera
>Club.  The instructor was Edward Bafford [ now deceased] who had some
>recognition as a pictorialist.  Now at the time the reigning
>pictorialist photographer in Baltimore was A. Aubrey Bodine, who
>worked for the Baltimore Sun and for others as well; his daughter
>Jennifer maintains a website for his work and sells prints to
>order.   Bafford was somewhat jealous of Bodine, as just about
>everyone in the area was, and  the classes  regularly featured
>detailed descriptions of just how Bodine [and Bafford and any other
>skilled pictorialist] made award-winning pictures.   The artifices
>that those people used in the darkroom would put photoshop jockeys to
>shame.  The transplantation of clouds was the simplest of the
>tricks.  They used paper negatives, scribbled on the backs of inter-
>prints with pencil, charcoal, or crayon , and made unsharp masks by
>hand.  A picture of a skipjack sailing the Chesapeake might have
>dramatic clouds and a flock of Canada geese added in for effect.  And
>part of the trick was to make a negative which  could be used to
>produce contact prints of the 'adjusted' picture -- the original negs
>were in the file drawers to contribute to other pictures as needed.
>I was and am completely unable to reproduce these effects -- there
>was no hands-on work -- but I did learn not to believe photographs,
>even when the negative was available.
>
>so the bottom line is that your restrictions in the end don't
>restrict very much- those geezers could take a dull shot, jazz it up,
>and produce a negative that  could stand up to scrutiny and that was
>as 'synthetic' as the most off-the-wall photoshop montage of our
>day.  Some things don't change....




Good Mornin' John!

I've been aware, for many years, that some folks do/did that sort of 
thing in wet darkrooms, though I was not aware of the two gentlemen 
you mention.

  Emile Zola once said: "In my view you cannot claim to have seen 
something until you have photographed it."

These gentlemen (and others like them) may have been talented 
darkroom wizards, but they were not photographers.  They were 
frustrated (or incapable) artists.

Extra geese, different clouds etc., are all covered by "the insertion 
of new elements".  Such works are not photographs, for the original 
scene never existed.  They are paintings, done in a different medium, 
in the same way an artist chooses Oil, acrylics, pencil, etc.

I hope you enjoyed your course, but, as a photographer, I am pleased 
you did not master their techniques! :-)

Thanks for tellling us the story!

Cheers!

---

David Young,
Logan Lake, CANADA

Personal Web-site at: http://www3.telus.net/~telyt
Limited Edition Prints at: http://www3.telus.net/~telyt/prints.htm
Leica Reflex Forum web-page:  http://www3.telus.net/~telyt/lrflex.htm






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