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.
