Custom

As A-1 was a custom print lab, the big selling point was that our products were better than what any normal lab could produce; our prints tailor made according to the particular needs of the customer. Usually we think of photography as a truth telling medium. Generally, I think, people believe that what they take a picture of is what they will get in the final print. Up to a point this is true - the negative is indeed a sort of immutable template of lights and darks and colors that more or less approximates the quality of light reflecting off the subject at the very moment the camera shutter was released. A picture of a table will, in the final print, still indeed resemble that very table.

It's just that a lot can happen in the space between exposure and the final print. The film is processed, the negatives edited, and the prints crafted, prepared and trimmed or mounted for presentation. During this process the original exposure can be cropped, enlarged, lightened, darkened, and the colors shifted. Basically all the formal elements that sway our thoughts and feelings about any given picture, and that as viewers we rarely ever think consciously about, can be transformed in the lab. And it is exactly this sort of tweaking of forensic imagery that A-1 sold.

Now it wasn't really as ominous as that sounds. Every custom lab makes pictures look better. Its just that when words like law and evidence are tied in you'd think a higher code of conduct would be in order - that ideally in making prints destined for the hallowed halls of justice, impartiality toward the look of things would prevail. Routinely, though, I would fudge in a bit of blue or purple, or maybe even green, to close-up shots of bruises, or added a little warmth to abrasions, lesions, lacerations and rashes. Nothing that the average person would ever notice, the colors were always within that narrow band of the believable. It's just that the work wasn't always so completely neutral. A little twist of hue, here and there, was sometimes all that was needed to make an injury look a little more egregious.

Other times the manipulation could be slightly more dubious, affecting the gravity of the situation. Imagine the scene of a large open pit mine, trucks and machines dotting the landscape and open factory structures sorting earth and rocks with workers all over, doing this and that, milling around, dwarfed by the enormity of the worksite. Our client represented a man who, at this site, had lost his right arm in a dreadful conveyor belt accident. The poor fellow believed the company was negligent; that the machines lacked proper safety mechanisms and that the worksite was needlessly dangerous. Easy enough to show - the photographer goes out, takes wide shots of the scene, close ups of all the machinery, and the lawyers will take care of the rest, pointing out places with missing signage, the lack of safety controls and devices, dramatize the general disorder of the worksite, etc.

The thing is, all the documentary photographs were taken in October, the time of year with the most beautiful deep blue sky you will ever see and which, irregardless of subject matter, is guaranteed to make you feel pretty good about life - an emotion usually avoided in all but the worst examples of forensic photography. It just doesn't work to have pictures of a grey, desolate, muddy strip mine strewn with dangerous dingy looking machines in the bottom half of a picture while the upper half is filled with the rich saturated azure blue one usually only associates with tropical island travel brochures. Something obviously had to be done. Fortunately the fix was easy: during the printing, I simply dodged the top half of the picture, effectively lightening the sky enough that it came out a flat dull unhappy grey, transforming what was at best a strangely surreal industrial paradise into a scene of certain doom and gloom.