After the USA road trip

6000 miles and 350 rolls of black and white film for our two and a half month road trip through the United States this past summer. A pilgrimage for my American wife Nancy Guri, visiting friends and family all along the way with the final destination her home state of Oregon (and her high school reunion in the southern city of Medford); and for me, an opportunity to return to some of the great zoos of the country and also some of its great museums, in particular, of modern art. So, culture, animals, and family was the agenda. We returned to France the end of July, and since then I’ve been developing film in my basement-laboratory in my village in southern France, and doing the contact sheets! Yes, I know, I’m a relic of another era, still using my old cameras (non-digital), still shooting mostly black and white, still doing my own film development, my own contact sheets, my own prints. It’s a long slow process but it’s a rhythm I’m used to. You might call it dark-room meditation. After breakfast, I head to the my basement, out the kitchen, across the terrace, down the terrace stairs, through the back garden and around to the door leading into the semi-daylight basement. There I hang up my black curtains, prepare the chemicals, put on the radio or one of my CDs, and I’m in my own cave-world, emerging out into the sunlight (or the rain as the case may be, but more often sunlight) when my stomach tells me it is time for lunch. If I have a lot of work, I’ll head back about mid-afternoon until dinner.

That’s the schedule I’m in now. I’ve done about a hundred contact sheets, so 250 more to go! Until I get them done, I don’t know how the trip went photographically speaking. The darkroom work is often tedious and repetitive, but then comes the pleasure of taking the magnifying glass and pouring through the contact sheets, looking through each sheet in hopes of finding a photo or two that shines out from the crowd, the photos worth printing. Those get marked with my red crayon. Later I’ll print the selected photos, and the winnowing process goes on—which of those continue to shine? Sometimes a photo that looks good on the contact sheet just doesn’t make it once it’s printed. But sometimes, if I’m lucky, it does!

So now, I’m off to my basement-cave.

PS: That’s me to the left in the photo with a friend Michael, clowning with our cameras in Medford, Oregon.