POST #178: TURNING PHOTO-LEMONS INTO PHOTO-LEMONADE

Projected Wall Image

Projected Wall Image

I recently received an e-mail from a photographer friend (one of the best I know) asking me to give him a crash course in photo composition. While my technical skills as a photographer are “weak” (to be kind), I’m really good at composing images. Those of you who know me know I hate technology; anything that requires me to press more than two buttons sends me into a panic. But all those courses I took in Two-Dimensional Design in school plus twenty-plus years of teaching art history on the college level have sharpened my eye to the point where I can take the most mediocre, banal image and crop it into a masterpiece. For many years I was invited by local camera clubs to judge their shows, although I was careful to explain that I didn’t know an f stop from a hole in the wall. But what I could do was take the really bad photos they projected onto a screen and, using my fingers, crop them into works of art. You could hear an audible gasp from the audience when the miracle took place.

“Under the El“. Overlapping projections. 6’x8’

A few years after I graduated art school, I decided I wanted to paint a series of urban scenes (a la Ben Shahn.)  I bought a ‘point and shoot’ Brownie camera for about $3 dollars plus a couple of rolls of black and white film (all there was) and went down to the Lower East Side to photograph architectural details. I never got around to the paintings and the photographs along with their negatives went into a drawer where they inexplicably remained untouched for over twenty years. As 2”x2”snapshots, they were truly awful, but for some reason, I took them into the local camera store and had them enlarged. The level of detail was extraordinary and I discovered that each print could be composed/cropped into a half dozen reasonably successful photographs. In fact, the quality of the enlargements, given the basic point and shoot technology of my Brownie camera, was so remarkable that I was even able to make 6’ posters without loss of detail. My negatives yielded a treasure trove of urban imagery I’ve been mining ever since. A few years ago a cinematographer friend, CiCi Artist and I made a movie out of the photos and around that time I put together an illustrated book of Lower East Side memoirs provided by friends. I also created and “environment” by projecting the photos onto four large gallery walls, allowing visitors to become part of the scene. By the magic of judicious cropping, my amateurish Brownie snapshots turned into a gift that keeps giving.

Projected Wall Image