The Large Format Conspiracy

In these digital days of point-and-shoot and cell-phone cameras it may come as a surprise that Large Format photographers are alive and active. They exist as custodians of a wonderful past. More importantly, they exist because the discipline of using the large format camera offers a distinct way of seeing. The process is necessarily deliberate: the image is composed on the ground glass screen inverted and reversed — an arrangement that helps to brings out the graphic composition.Darkroom printing creates a performance memory that bonds the photographer to the image. The New England Large Format Photographic Collective, NELFPC, was created a few years ago to bring together like minded practitioners and promote the art of the view camera.

Toyo 4x5 View Camera and Goat near the Masherbrum base camp, Karakoram 2001. Photograph by Rob White.

Thanks to the determination of its founder Steve Sherman, NELFPC has arranged a special

Large Format Weekend, March 27-29.

Friday March 27: Trip to the AIPAD exhibit in New York City. Gene LaFord will hang work by NELFPC members in the Valley Photo Center in Springfield MA.

Saturday March 28: Workshop-demonstration by Bob Carnie, master printer and photographer (Elevator Photographic, Toronto, Canada). The workshop will be conducted in Steve Sherman’s large darkroom in Rocky Hill, Connecticut.

Sunday March 29: Lectures and discussion at the Valley Photo Center, Springfield, MA.

I (Kenneth Hanson) will speak about the creation of Himalayan Portfolios; Journeys of the Imagination.

Paul Turnbull, Director of the Hallmark Museum of Contemporary Photography in Turner Falls MA, will describe his work as a curator (his most recent exhibit was of work by Paul Caponigro). He will also talk about the process of creating a book of his own photographs.

My Talk:

The Process and the Dream: Himalayan Portfolios

The book was created in a period when enormous technical advances were being made in scanning and digital printing. I will discuss my stumbling technical progress and the expert involvement of Charles Fields, Gail Fields and Glen Bassett. . The timeline was as follows: The initial conversation with Charles Fields took place in 1999. A tentative structure emerged after I mounted a large solo exhibit at UConn in early 2002. Two further Himalayan trips were made and the text was written and rewritten. In 2006 came the editorial choice of images and the contract commitment. The book was almost press ready, barring final corrections and the duotone separations, in late 2007. The press run was completed March 1, 2008 and the shipment arrived from Korea on Cape Cod May 19.

A book is more that a grab bag of well rendered photographs. My fundamental task has been to explore photographically the concept of the Himalayan journey, both as reality and as symbol, by documenting actual journeys.

Precise documentation is an essential part of the view camera aesthetic. In Part 1 I have emphasized the specificity of the process by including maps, by noting the trek day on which each photograph was taken, by reporting the elevation of camera and peaks, and by outlining the geology, but I have omitted the usual travel anecdotes about lost duffle bags, altitude, apple bandy and what not. In many cases the landscape images include Buddhist emblems of the Absolute: prayer stones, isolated monasteries, prayer flags, cairns. A few portraits have been included.

The images were selected on the basis of on my own subjective judgments, but viewers will bring to the book their own prior experience and will make from the photographs their own imaginative journeys. The Himalayas are emblems of the ultimate challenge and the final passage between life and death. As such they demand our serious attention.

The second part of the book is a record of my own iconic explorations; the essay is an Enquiry in the eighteenth century sense rather than a statement of beliefs. I am concerned about the childhood sense of curiosity and astonishment without which the journey would not take place. I am concerned about Western and Buddhist narrative frames and modes of perception: there are Western traditions of exploration and mountaineering, and there is the understanding of the mountains by the people of the mountains. I am concerned about the poetic concepts of the quest and of the Mountain Sublime — call it joy, beauty, terror. I am concerned about the journey that abandons security and moves beyond the certainty of accepted boundaries.

In presenting my photographs I am faced with a dilemma. Given the constraints of time and attention, it makes sense to reverse this presentation — to begin with some theme examined in the essay, such as the elements of the heroic journey or the concept of the Sublime, and then use the photographs to illustrate the theme. But the book allows the viewer to follow the photographer who first had to learn to trust the landscape. I had to feel the space encountered in order that the two-dimensional print could be an entrance to an imagined space. The discovered emblems, the whole notion of a Himalayan journey arose from that experience. Much the same could be said about the art of listening: trust the music, trust the poem. From such trust much else can follow.

These reflections were, in part, prompted by an Amazon review written by a friend, Kate Latimer. In order to appreciate the power of the book, she found she needed to view and read its "chapters” over several days. “Each chapter invites you to feel as well as see the stark reality of being in the midst of such dangerous and overwhelming landscapes.” (You can find her words via my Web site under Reviews.)

Another factor was the viewing af extraordinary 1973 Spanish movie The Spirit of the Beehive directed by Victor Erice and photographed by Luís Cuadrado (Criterion, 2006). The setting is 1940 soon after the end of the Spanish Civil War. The superb images of the bleak Castilian landscape and sparsely furnished house interiors are haunting, as is the acting of the small six year old girl Ana. In some ways the making of a movie is like making a photographic book: images have to be chosen and ordered in a meaningful sequence. With the movie came a documentary “Footprint of the Spirit” in which the director, writer and producer discussed the generation of the film. It has sections entitled: Primordial Images, Traces of Light, Journey of a Child’s Gaze, Interior Exiles, Return to the Source. They were organizing the film in terms of echoing symbols and yet the subject was the, ultimately mysterious, unbounded imaginative world of the little girl as she encounters gentleness and danger and the death of a fugitive. As they proceeded they found they could throw away the framing material about the devastation left by the Civil War and leave the biographies of the adult parents undefined. Symbols dissolved into events. The movie forces the viewer to identify with Ana and thus to construct the unexplained mysteries and dangers as seen through her eyes. I am still trying to find words for this experience: astonishment is linked to fear and trust. Is this what my book is about?