Boris Savelev

 I was browsing the photography featured at the Michael Hoppen Gallery website when I came across a selection of pictures by the Ucranian photographer, Boris Savelev, which I had not known before. 

I'm not sure how I missed becoming aware earlier of this artist's long career, characterized by an extraordinary use of color and composition.  According to the biographical information on Savelev's page at the Hoppen site he was born in Ukraine in 1947, but moved to Moscow as a young man where he took up photography after graduating there from the Institute of Aeronautics.  Savelev became well known for his photography in the Soviet Union before its breakup and also had his work featured in many exhibitions internationally.  According to Michael Hoppen:

"He first came to the attention of the Western art world with the publication of Secret City by Thames and Hudson in 1988. This photobook established Savelevs' reputation as one of the most serious artists of a new generation of photographers emerging from the former Sovient Union."

Savelev's early published work in the Soviet Union was all black and white.  In the 1980s he began doing color slides, first using East German Orwachrome, and then switching to Kodachrome for its better capacity for color publication.  In 2000 he began shooting digital with a Leica Digilux. 

 A review of a Savelev retrospective appeared in The Guardian in June of 2024.

There is an interview of Savelev on the Form Magazine website.

Rearranging Reality

 All of my Kodak Retinas have excellent lenses, but I've always felt the Xenon on my 1949 Retina II is the best of the bunch.  Support for that judgment was found on a roll of Kentmere 100 which I put through the camera about seven years ago.  The sharpness and tonalities from the pictures seemed near perfect to me.

When I put the pictures in a blog post, though, what really stood out was the fact that two adjacent pictures really seemed to want to be in the same frame together.  So, looking at them recently, I decided to stitch the two horizontal compositions together  into a single vertical one..

The white picket fence is in front of our house.  The upper section of the composition shows the railroad tracks about a mile to the east.  Both pictures looked pretty good to me, but I thought the combination added some interesting depth. 

Kodak Retina II -- Xenon f:2/50mm

What's On Your Desktop?

  All the available wall space in our little house has been long occupied by prints and paintings.  The one space which remains available and easily changed is the desktop screen on my old iMac.  Lately, I've been displaying some of my favorite photographs there.

For the purpose, I tend to prefer black & white or a limited color palette along with a strong graphic design.

I tend to size my photographs for online display to be slightly smaller than my 21.5-inch screen, but stretching them slightly to fit does not seem to result in any significant degredation.

 I have also drawn on my collection of 3D graphics which I was making years ago .  They are all ultra-simple and give me an uncomplicated working space.

Of course there is no shortage of images available on the Web which can be appropriated for the desktop.  A source I have been using for a long time is The Biodiversity Heritage Library which has over three hundred thousand images of natural history subjects including a lot of great old drawings.

There are collections of desktop images that come along with any computer operating system, but it seems a lot more fun to personalize your desktop with your own work or images you admire from other sources.

More from the Duaflex

 Another sunny December day and another roll of film in the Kodak Duaflex.  This time it is some Arista Edu Ultra 200 of indeterminate age.  The box does not seem to have an expiration date.  I got it some time past from Free Style.   I suspect this is repackaged Fomapan as the pre-soak came out of the tank very blue.  All of the shots were made with a light yellow filter over the lens.  Processing was in Rodinal 1:50.  

See some more about the first model Kodak Duaflex and its designer in an article on my old website.

The Duaflex in Old Town

New Mexico is having an exceptionally warm and sunny winter.  Good conditions for one of my sunny day cameras, the Kodak Duaflex.  I loaded it with Kentmere 100 and took a walk around Old Town.

I processed the film in Rodinal.  That works well with most 100-speed films, but not so much this time.  I had to adjust tonalities significantly in Photoshop.  I am going to try again,  maybe with 400-speed film, along with a yellow filter for the bright sun scenes and processing in HC110.

Sally Mann

I am a long-time fan of Sally Mann, so I was pleased to happen on a link at Photrio to a video of an appearance she made at the Rhode Island School of Design.  She spoke briefly about her latest book, Art Work: On the Creative Life, and she then answered questions from a panel of three RISD teachers.  Mann talked about her long career and her photographic style and techniques, mostly with large format gear.

Mann did a nice job of explaining her creative process.  She admitted that she really often only has a vague idea initially about where her efforts will take her, relying on the pictures she makes to reveal a path toward a theme. She complimented her long-time editor in assembling her projects into book form.

I was particularly interested in seeing that her photography, even though having a spontaneous look, really depends on a lot of staging and direction.  I have three of her books, so I'm a little surprised that I was not more consciously aware of that aspect of her work earlier.  Given the fact that Mann has mostly used cumbersome large format cameras, it is really inevitable that some directorial work is required to produce her images.

I have expressed some distaste for staged work before, most recently in regard to a big show at the Albuquerque Museum of the work of Cara Romero.  I think the difference is that Mann's staging contributes to bringing out the fundamental character and experiences of her subjects, while Romero's elaborately staged and oversized images seem to me to be contrived and lacking in a clear meaning.

Mann's earlier work focused on her family, but she says she now makes no pictures of people and is only doing landscapes. She expressed some positive feelings about the possibilities of digital and said she currently often uses a small Leica digital camera.  At the same time, she also is clearly excited about the opportunity to explore experimental darkroom  techniques such as solarization.

Testing The Limits

While the Anscoflex II offers some control beyond that available from other simple cameras, the possibilities are still considerably less that those offered by more sophisticated designs.  The control features of the camera must also be used with some care and discretion.

What I found while working through the twelve available frames on some Kentmere 400 was that the close-up lens and the yellow filter cannot be simultaneously employed.  So a close-up with the filter compensating for bright sun with fast film is not an option.

I also found with the ruby window removed for improved frame numeral visibility that I needed to carefully avoid exposing the film's paper backing to any hint of direct sunlight.  The first half of this roll of film looked good in terms of exposure, but there were some washed out frames further down the roll.

So a deliberate and thoughtful approach to using the Anscoflex II along with stationary subjects enhance the likelihood of success.  I found that trying to grab shots of our active dog out in the yard was a bit beyond the boundary of success.