Years ago, b&w LF photography was THE mainstream advertising medium and not simply a craft thingy with which dilettantes now dabble, in between ceramics classes and botox injections.
In those days, schools which considered photography an art, trained their budding photographic artistes in the art department. Those schools who believed photography was a trade, located their photo department in the same grungy building with the print shop and auto body shop.
I was trained to be an artiste at Art Center College of Design, where students agonized daily over the meaning of life and the existential character of hyper-reality and the human condition. It was beneath us to lean how to retouch nose hair in a portrait. Words like “history” became “historicity”. No one took “shots” or even “photographs” anymore; he only made “images”. Cable release in one hand, glass of white wine in the other.
A slightly out-of-focus image of a smashed mushroom became a paradigm into the obtuse tortured soul of the artiste. When I naively asked the student to elaborate, I was told that if he had to explain it to me I would never understand. He was probably right.
Perhaps you can tell that the art thing didn’t quite take, in my case. So after a few years of assisting some reely, reely big Hollywood photographers, I returned to New England to shoot 8x10 b&w commercial/industrial photography with other real men. Guys who look for the Guldens’ mustard in the gourmet aisle.
As a staff photographer in a large catalogue studio, I became a grunt in the old-time photographic infantry. Given an 11x14 Deardorff with an 8x10 reducing back and a few Mole-Richardson lights, I was expected to turn out a tastefully lit, properly exposed and tray-developed sheet of Super XX every fifteen to thirty minutes, all day long.
We shot Breck shampoo bottles, Absorbine Junior, S&W handguns, Milton Bradley games, Stanley tools, Church toilet seats and Columbia bicycles. Even did a catalogue of porta-potties and another of oak caskets.
Most negs were silhouetted with Kodak opaque. And each was contact printed onto between 25 and 500 sheets of Azo, before being ferro typed on huge gas-fired Pako drum dryers. It was a production line. Cases upon cases of glossies went out the door every day.
We didn’t have time to agonize over the human condition nor anything else. At those market rates for commercial photography, as Nike says, we had to just do it.
Unlike the artistic crowd, we had to keep moving. And our equipment and material decisions reflected that. We couldn’t spend a half hour frolicking in a tray of 1:100 Rodinal, nor did we have time nor budget to horse around with toning that many prints. We couldn’t afford Polaroid check shots. There wasn’t time to go into a trance over Merklinger’s Hinge Rule; we just bumped the massive wooden front standard with our elbow until it looked sharp.
Never in our wildest dreams did we imagine doing anything “archival”. Never heard the word. Like the old-timer on the RFD Channel said the other day about his antique manure spreader, "One of the best machines ever made, even if the manufacturer did refuse to stand behind it".
Very, very different from much of the conversations I read on today’s photographic forums.
I don’t mean to sound truculent, nor even vitriolic. I have enormous admiration for anyone who bothers to wrestle with a wooden camera these days. And I can certainly learn a whole bunch from the mad chemists brewing their Pyro potions. In fact, I sometimes feel like a Midas Muffler guy touring the Ferrari factory.
But I can’t help wondering how many of us elder photo grunts with chemically tainted brown fingernails who actually earned a living at this are still left here.
Semper Fi...
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