Nearly a hundred years ago my great grandmother stood in exactly this spot. Here’s to her and all the brave women without whom none of us would exist. The print is a silver gelatin repro I made directly off the original small print from my family archive.
Took the beast out today to celebrate the rays of sun. Loading up the Pentax 67 is one of the most satisfying things ever. Looking forward to using medium format more this year.
If you are adventurous and want to save time when developing 120 film here’s a top tip for you: if you separate the backing paper from the film but leave the tape on, you can use that strip of tape to attach another 120 roll to it. Most reels, will accommodate 220 film, so fitting 2x 120 is no problem. Like this you can develop more film without having to use huge tanks. The only thing you need to keep in mind is that you might have to compensate your developer as you’re doubling the amount of film, you might have to double the amount of dilution for your developer. This obviously varies depending on if you’re using a one shot like Rodinal or a replenish-able developer like X-Tol or ID-11. For sake of demonstration I used a colour and a B/W film, the B/W has the greyish base, the other is colour. This is just for demonstration, please don’t turn on the light to stick your films together.
A place with no digital distractions — who would have thought that one day we would crave being offline, the complete opposite of what people assumed. These few days in Rome have been so rewarding, to refocus, reflect. Having a desk with no screen, just a window, pen, paper, … food for the brain and soul.
Sometimes I really wonder if we will ever experience a great design era again. Phones are expensive, yet they feel cheap and disposable after only a couple of years. Car interiors—even from premium brands—have become almost exclusively plastic. Cameras have followed suit. Many architects have failed society by bowing to the convenience of concrete and steel, drowning us in a ‘salad of brutalism.’
Will we ever see a camera like the 1930s Art Deco Rolleicord again? Will we ever have beautiful cars that look like art, rather than the wet dream of a designer stuck in a Fifth Element loop, placing RGB lights at every corner? Will hand-painted signage ever return? Or architecture made from organic materials like brick and wood?
Things no longer feel unique. The iPhone is just a repetitive iteration of the model before it; there is nothing truly distinct about it. Are we stuck in a loop, simply feeding shareholders and cyber-corporations?
1-3. “Tapeten” Rolleicord
4. Mercedes W110 “Heckflosse” in Helsinki
5. Old Postal Building, Vienna
6. Fiat 500
7. Rome
8. Helsinki Central Train Station
9. Signage seen at Wien Museum
10. VW Golf Mark I
It’s been over 2 months that I started using my iPod again and there’s some truly refreshing when you can listen to music from a device that has no internet, no distractions. Maybe the convenience of having everything in one device was good at some point, but I feel like we’ve reached the point of diminishing returns. Just like shooting film, sometimes the longer way round is the most rewarding one. P.S the chemical on the very left is exhausted Rodinal.
Recent reading: Sally Mann “On the Creative Life” (finished, really good), Sally Mann “Hold Still” (stated, great so far), Aleida Assmann text on Memory with mention of Christian Boltanksi (very thought provoking, generally her writing is great), Guido Guidis latest book “Album, 1969-82” (forever a fan) and finally Experimental Photography in the New Bauhaus Chicago, page opened to Aaron Siskind (one of my favourite photographers).
