Cee’s Black and White Challenge:Telephones

Good morning from a sunny Good Friday in Hastings.

I have spoken before of experimenting with the grunge affect in the dark room, long before it became a preset filter for Photoshop.  This photo was part of an exhibition I had in Austria and Italy back in 1994 – 1995. The theme of the exhibition was Nostalgia.  I was with 3 others.  Tony went around taking photos of old buildings.  Gerhard was a doctor and took photos of his oldest patients while Maria took coloured photos of different festivals that was a tradition in Austria.  I was, obviously, the only foreigner and the only one to experiment so radically for my images.  My concept was because I was so far away from my home country that the phone was a connection to my past.  It was deliberately out of focus because looking back can be fuzzy – with memories not as clear anymore.  Well sort off.

I went through a lot of paper and chemicals to get this affect.  I experimented with different  papers before finally coming up with a heavy grainy paper from England.  The photo was taken deliberately out of focus and slightly over exposed when I printed it.  For the sepia affect I experimented with using different textured fabrics soaked in the sepia toning and laid it over the image to get the grunge affect.  I don’t know how many different types of fabric I used before I got this final image.  This was such a long winded process so that I am so glad that we had digital processing now.

This is for Cee at Cee’s Photography‘s challenge this week which calls for telephones – old, new, vintage, cell phones.

Cee’s Black & White Photo Challenge: Telephones – new, cell, vintage, etc.

https://ritvasillanmaki.wordpress.com/2015/04/02/cees-bw-vintage-telephones/

Telephone Boxes – soon a thing of the past

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