Semester 1 – Week 11

This week promised to be a busy one. I had received my redscale negatives of Dudley Zoo at the back end of last week so needed to scan them in, as well as prepare some for the session I was to have with Jim in the Print Support Hub later. On top of this I wanted to run off some colour darkroom prints and we also had to present our Final Review presentations to the rest of the group.

Early entry into the building guarantees a spot on a Mac with the Epson scanner, so I was straight in. Setting up the scanner and prepping the negatives I began to scan them in, and they looked good, I was happy with them.

Negative Feedback

When I had the negatives back from AG Photolab I’d also asked for a set of prints and this gave me a good idea of what they might look like, I had chosen three images from this set of 45 images to begin scanning. Upon receiving them back I also noticed that the three contained my 100th film I’d exposed over the course of the last 3.5 years of study at Wolves.

I chose to lay out the photos on a table in the studio area and it was apparent that the three pictures I’d selected weren’t going to work. Two were landscape orientation with the third being portrait. It looked odd, Sam helped me by having a look through some of my other possibles and I selected another landscape orientation shot, that showed the detail of the kiosk and the images that are displayed in the small square window frames.

Sam also wanted me to send him the “henge” photo for use in the promo works, this looked good as a portrait photo and had some room for titles and captions.

I had got most of the way through scanning the neg strips that held the images selected and then we had to have a bit of a break for the presentations.

Before we started Sam showed us the Centrala gallery website and that our exhibition was now being listed on their events page. There have been som epromo works on the instagram page too and we are all looking forward to the event.

Present And Correct

Time for presentations on our work towards the “The Matter Of The Black Country” exhibition.

Up first was Joe who has been shooting football matches and the surroundings at West Brom, he’s completed four shoots already which isn’t easy when you’re not allowed to take cameras into the football grounds.

Joel up next with talk of his inspirations by Aaron Siskind, his shots showing us derelict buildings, peeling paint and degradation. Joel is involved in URBEX (Urban Exploring) so finds some great locations for his photographs.

The photographer behind the image on the poster above, Angus, (Long Cheung) stood up to discuss his works as they were presented on the large screen. His images fit into my likes and the photos of factory ventilation ducts and chimneys, big tanks really fit my bill.

Callum has been visiting car boot sales in the Black Country and capturing images of the people selling and buying, as well as some of the contents of the stalls. Sam mentioned “Non-conformists” by Martin Parr as a work to look into. Parr also has a book called “Black Country Stories” in whihc he captures the residents of the region in different circumstances and locations. It’s a fascinating book and it covers many of the topics being photographed by our group. There are some football fan images, market stalls and sellers, signs and shop windows, most accompanied with the names and locations.

Meg has been capturing contemporary and historical shots of Walsall. Which is a place she spends a lot of her time, Sam said it sometimes pays to “Shoot what you know”.

Courtney is still shooting Food of the Black Country and has found inspiration in the works of Klaus Pichler and Martin Parr. Courtney’s photo of an orange chip (a chip in batter) has been used as the main poster for the exhibition too. It’s very striking.

Sophie decided that she didn’t want to present to everyone so showed Sam afterwards, she also had a huge cold so she was feeling a bit rough I imagine.

Clare showed us her images of light painting and industrial landscapes, in some of them she’s overlayed them as if a double exposure. It works well and shows off some night shoots alongside a daytime shot of a dilapidated place. She was inspired by the paintings of the Black Country at night which are in the Wolverhampton Gallery, and show the region in its full industrial glory.

Evie-Mae showed us how her project began with taking photographs of the region’s canals but found that she was struggling with inspiration so changed to her comfort zone and current practice, “urban banality” She is inspired by Stephen Shore and Aaron Siskind

I was up next and showed the powerpoint that I had submitted with the placeholder images in it. I did have some small 8×6 prints that I had from AG Photolab so I shared these with the group and had a chat with Sam and the rest of the group about why I’d ended up taking these photos. Almost all of the people in the room who had grown up locally have at one time or another been to the zoo. Many of them as children and they still remember the experience. My thought that the architecture might take people back to their childhoods appears to be a reasonable assumption.

Lilly was up next with their presentation, it garnered a few giggles and guffaws with some of its layout but I wouldn’t be able to risk this as part of an academic document. It was funny though.

It started off with the title page “My crackin’ final review” and had been capturing large/medium format images of the Black Country landscapes left over from the industrial period. This didn’t work out for some reason so they had changed to photographing Saltwell Nature Reserve.

Inspiration for Lilly’s work was provided by Ansel Adams, who Lilly had a slide titled “Man like Ansel” with a portrait of Adams featuring a caption “bloke in question”

Louise had been out taking photographs inspired by Thomas Duke and his project “Stepping Through Time”. She had a lot of old photographs from her grandparents collections and had taken few to the locations of the original image, then held up the photo in front of the background. It worked well but due to the aperture being set wide, the photo was properly in focus and the background fully blurred out, if it was me I may have shut down the aperture and tried to get that depth of field so the background and foreground felt more linked.

Dani started off taking photographs of people in the Black Country sitting down. She was inspired by Vivian Maier and her street photography originally. The photos she chose to share with us were some great images of the inside of an old Banks’s Pub that had been in a state of dereliction for a while. It was a wonderful photograph too.

Back To The Dark

Once the presentations were completed it was time to head back to the task in hand of scanning in my negatives. Once these were scanned in I went to see Dan and pick up the colour medium format kit for the enlargers. Then I began setting up for the printing of some Fujicolor Crystal Archive paper with the images I’d selected.

I set up and ran off a quick test strip before the time had come to go and see Jim in the Print Support Hub to get my images printed off in much bigness. We were to print our photos in A1 size on Titanium Lustre Paper, mounted on board and then have a stand off frame mounted on the rear so it lifts it away from the wall.

As I got up to see Jim, he downloaded the photos from the OneDrive link I’d sent earlier and then did a bit of configuring to add the three images to one document which he would then print on a roll from the HP Designjet Z6810 Photo Printer.

He got them going and said that it would take around 45 mins so I could pop back later to see how they’d come out. He then hit me with the bill for this and it came out at £30 for each photo. That’s £30 for an A1 Print on amazing paper, mounted onto board and fitted with the hardware required to hang on the gallery wall. Absolute bargain.

Back into the darkroom, the enlarger was looking a bit skewiff and I figured out that there was an issue with it, the head of the enlarger moves left to right as if something has broken around the back, I had a quick look but could see nothing obvious. I spoke to Dan and he was a bit concerned too, I have seen this in the past , that the projected light wasn’t square on the easel. I’d assumed that it was something I was doing, but when I realised that pushing it sideways, squared it up I noticed that the plane it was sitting on was probably out too. If it’s leaning over then the image on the easel might not all be in focus, only the part where I chose to use the focus finder. I left it and moved onto the B1 LPL Enlarger as this didn’t have the same issues.

After setting up and beginning I started banging out a few images onto 8×10 paper and then onto 10×12 paper but the images left a lot to be desired. I won’t use these to sell at the gallery during the exhibition as there is a lack of detail in the lower and darker part of the image. In the printed version of the digital scan, the detail in the underside of the wavy concrete roof is far more noticeable.

Jim’ll Print It

After I’d finished printing in the darkroom it was time to head back up to see Jim, I stopped by Dan’s stores to give him back the equipment I’d borrowed, as well as the others components that other students had left in there. I showed him the images that I’d been working on and he said that the image did not do a lot for him, because of the heaviness of the colours. He said that he thought the lighter version of the colours would help it be a more suitable photo for display.

Up to Jim’s Hub and my prints were hanging out the front of the HP printer, we picked it up and laid it carefully onto the prep table where I could see all three images together.

Jim gave me an order form to take to Wayne in the wood shop who builds up the frames and he said that he’d be able to look at putting it all together soon.

I’ve left this with Jim, Wayne and Dan and I have had the confirmation that the job is done and ready for the exhibition in January, can’t wait to see them fully mounted and on the wall now… Underneath you can see the centre image of the entrance turnstile roof which I was trying to print in the darkroom off the negatives. The detail underneath the cover are far more interesting and visible than the C Type prints.

Summary

It was a busy day. With the scanning of the negatives, printing in the colour darkroom and setting up for the printing with Jim, on top of the presentation of the Final Reviews all made for a tired me at the end of the day. This was also the day after I had spent all weekend in London on a Street Photography Workshop with a famous photographer. More on that in a later post.

The shots I have chosen for the final show might not be to everyones’ taste but I mainly make photographs for me, that I like. If it triggers a memory in a Black Country person then that’s even better. I’d prefer to focus on the architecture rather than the animals themselves as I am always a little uncomfortable about animals being kept in enclosures, cages and zoos. Not to the point that I’m going to start protesting but I have to ask myself the question as to whether they do make a difference in the world.

The concrete buildings in the shots chosen represent some of my favourite parts of the architecture in the Zoo and Castle grounds. The buildings designed and built by Berthold Lubetkin and the Tecton Architecture group are like nothing else that was being designed at the time in the mid 1930s, possibly because of Lubetkin’s education and studies of the Marxism and the thoughts of other contemporary philosophers. In one German paper, Freiheit from 1922, Lubetkin writes;

The shots I have made of the zoo over the last few months are full of curves, curved lines climbing up to viewing platforms and spirals. Circular buildings such as the aviary show the way he avoided the straight lines of normal conformist architecture. This sort of architecture also catches my eye in the Barbican centre, even though it was designed by Chamberlain, Powell and Bon and not started until 1965, they have a lot in common.

Right, time to wrap up and get on with the next post. Thanks for reading this, adn if you have any questions, please feel free to visit http://bobgriffiths.uk and send me a message via the email address or the instagram platform.