a con­ver­sa­tion with a few experts [pdf]

var­i­ous formulations

for many pyro­gal­lol and pyro­cat­e­chin developers

Pyro­cat HD

infor­ma­tion and links about this pop­u­lar stain­ing developer

Like -
but one also likes chicken soup with noodles,
one likes compliments and the color blue,
one likes an old scarf,
one likes having the upper hand,
one likes stroking a dog.

Poetry -
but what is poetry.
Many shaky answers
have been given to this question.
But I don’t know and don’t know and hold on to it
like to a sustaining railing.

- Wislawa Szymborska [translated by Regina Grol]

With shadows I draw worlds,
I scatter worlds with shadows.
I hear the light beat on the other side.

- Octavio Paz

Fried­lan­der won’t admit an influ­ence, offer­ing a good pot of beans as inspi­ra­tion enough and my father always said you weren’t really poor until you drank off the soup and cooked the beans again. I make these every few weeks.

Rinse a pound of white beans, great north­ern or navy don’t mat­ter, and soak in water overnight. In the morn­ing drain the beans and put them in a stock­pot along with a large diced white onion, a minced clove of gar­lic, 2 bay leaves, and a ham bone. Fill the pot with water a few inches above the beans and tie together a hand­ful of pars­ley and as many sprigs of thyme as you can find and set in on top. Bring the pot to boil on high heat and care­fully skim off any foam and scum that forms up on the sur­face, then turn the heat down low and half-way cover with a lid. Sim­mer the beans slow for two or three hours – what you want is just the per­cep­tion of bub­bling. From time to time skim off any more scum that might rise to the sur­face and then give the pot a good stir. Once the beans are cooked through remove what’s left of the tied up herbs and the ham bone and stir in salt and pepper to taste. Should you have any leftover ham, cut that up and add that to the pot too and simmer another twenty minutes and then the beans will be done. Best if you wait a day or two to let everything marry. Invite friends over; the beans are fine with toasted bread and baked squash. Freezes well.
 

GROUP A: STILL LIFES
This group, the ear­li­est on which I worked, was begun in 1935. I started with no for­mal train­ing at all as a painter or pho­tog­ra­pher, but with some back­ground as a writer, and a vast back­ground as a reader. Although this group orig­i­nated in a desire to develop fur­ther an inter­est in com­po­si­tion (incited by the dis­cov­ery of cer­tain art mag­a­zines in the 1930s) it even­tu­ally became involved in an urge to see how far my feel­ings about objects could become pro­jected through the cam­era; and in the dis­cov­ery of objects which could become the clues to changes in the nature of Amer­i­can cul­ture. Thus, here, as in much of my work, there is a pro­gres­sion from the semi-abstract to the poetic.

GROUP J: THE IMAGES OF THE LOST
Group J deals with the peo­ple rejected by our soci­ety; it is the first group pri­mar­ily devoted to human beings. But the peo­ple were very sel­dom pho­tographed where they were actu­ally found. Instead, a dif­fi­cult method was used: a spe­cial back­ground was selected for each per­son (often from places dis­cov­ered pre­vi­ously) with the inten­tion of mak­ing the back­ground work, not only in terms of design, but in terms of a sub­tle rev­e­la­tion of the over­all social sit­u­a­tion of the per­son. The peo­ple them­selves were not used as mod­els — they were not posed — nor were they used as “soci­o­log­i­cal doc­u­ments.” The attempt was to treat them as indi­vid­ual human beings. The over­all com­po­si­tion was deter­mined care­fully on the ground glass. But the expo­sure was not made till each per­son seemed to reveal him­self by some spon­ta­neous ges­ture or expression.

GROUP Q: NEW ANATOMIES
In this com­par­a­tively small group, which began in 1951, I have tried to show that the cam­era can explore the plas­tic poten­tial­i­ties of the human body in just as real a sense as, for instance, Picasso has done in some mar­velous draw­ings where he makes use of numer­ous kinds of dis­tor­tion in recre­at­ing the body; although in these pho­tos dis­tor­tion is not the method actu­ally used. Nev­er­the­less we are pre­sented with visions of the body which it would be impos­si­ble for the phys­i­cal eye directly to see. The pic­tures go com­pletely beyond the kind of “record­ing” func­tion usu­ally assigned to the cam­era, and instead of giv­ing us the results of direct vision, give us far more — the hyper-real vision cre­ated by the inner eye in man — the poetic, desir­ing, and dream­ing eye. Because of this, the erotic ele­ment becomes all the more intense. But due to the puri­tan­i­cal code dom­i­nat­ing this coun­try till recently, none of these pic­tures have ever been pub­lished or exhib­ited before. The basic quo­ta­tion for this series is from Hart Crane: “New thresh­olds, new anatomies!” And the last half of this quo­ta­tion is, lit­er­ally, the sub­ject for this group.

GROUP S: THE MAGIC OF THE OBJECT
It should be pointed out that Group S is the only one of the many groups I worked on which is entirely devoted to so-called com­mon­place objects. In this group I try to show how the pho­tog­ra­pher, like the painter and poet, can release a level of mean­ing from the most ordi­nary objects, which has noth­ing to do with their nat­u­ral­is­tic mean­ing. The pho­tog­ra­pher, of course, does this through intensely per­sonal vision (just as is true of the painter and the poet) and when this hap­pens, what the pho­tog­ra­pher is really deal­ing with is what the human mind has pro­jected into the object: the secret lan­guage of inan­i­mate objects, the hid­den images of man’s hopes and joys, his dreams and desires, by which he makes more human the inhu­man world around him. Although most of these pic­tures use the “found” object, all the objects are, in a deeper sense, “well arranged,” that is, light­ing, com­po­si­tion, and other fac­tors have been used, both con­sciously and com­pul­sively, to make more man­i­fest the hid­den mean­ings these objects have for the sen­si­bil­ity of the pho­tog­ra­pher. But, aside from all this, many of the objects in these pic­tures can be truly, con­sid­ered part of the iconog­ra­phy of our time.

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