Sean Duggan Blog

Spring Faerie #2

Spring Faerie #2 [Holga]

Spring Faerie #1

Spring Faerie #1 [Holga]

From yesterday's reinterpretation of an older image, we fast forward today to a photo from a week ago. This is from one of my test rolls after I fixed the broken shutter on my Holga (not much to fix, really, as those of you who have Holgas know!). My daughter decided to put on her faerie wings and Papa grabbed the Holga. The only Photoshop work here is the addition of the uneven sepia tone.

Potsdam Street

Street with Two Cars, Potsdam, East Germany, July 1990
Reinterpreted, February, 2005

I visited the Berlin/Potsdam area in early July of 1990. The Wall had been breached the previous October and the two Germanys were still in the middle of a complicated reunification process. On the day we arrived, East Germany officially began using the West German mark as their currency. This made purchasing things much easier and there were also no border controls. But technically, it was still East Germany.

Potsdam is a city on the outskirts of Berlin, famous for Sans Souci, the 18th century palace of Frederick the Great, as well as the location for the Potsdam Conference, where the U.S., Great Britain and the Soviet Union met in July 1945 after Germany's defeat to carve up Europe into the spheres of influence that would become the foundations for the Cold War. When we first visited, it was clear that 45 years of Communist rule and neglect had taken their toll and many of the streets looked like this one, with dilapidated, falling apart houses and buildings that looked like they hadn't seen any maintainence or a fresh coat of paint since the end of Worl War II. It was a strange, sad, almost abandoned atmosphere with traces of a former glory peeking through a patina of beautiful decay. When I returned four years later in 1994, things had been cleaned up quite a bit and the place was looking much more respectable.

This image is part of a series of Revisitations or Reinterpretations of older images. In them I use the source material of the original image (in this case a 35mm slide) and reinterpret the scene. In this image, the new interpretatation includes color and tonal modifications, color tinting, focus changes and the addition of the scuffed and scratched texture, which I felt went very well with the scuffed, scratched and abused look of Potsdam itself in 1990. As with the Prague images I have  posted recently, the ressurection of this image was initiated by a request from a photo editor for possible images to illustrate a short story set in Eastern Europe.

Narrow Alley #2, Prague

Narrow Alley #2, Prague, 1997

Is He Dead?

Is He Dead?
April 8, 2003 [pinhole photograph]

Sunday, April 24th was World Pinhole Photography Day 2005, and while I did not create any new pinhole images on this day, I did spend some time comtemplating pinhole imagery by sorting through the archives and looking at some pinhole negatives from a little over two years ago.

This photo was taken in a hotel room in San Francisco in early April 2003, during the U.S. invasion of Iraq. U.S. forces had already reached the outskirts of Baghdad by that time. The newspaper headline speculates on the fate of Saddam Hussein after a "bunker buster" bomb was dropped on a house where he was believed to be hiding.

The television is on in the background, tuned to The War, the ultimate in reality TV, and the 8-minute exposure has rendered it as a burned out, glaring white. I think this is appropriate given the way the broadcast media wallowed in mind-numbing, wall-to-wall, saturation coverage of the opening weeks of the war. And it is much the same today, of course, especially with the 24-hour cable networks. Just insert the crisis, lead story, or gossip du jour and they have so much air time to fill that it's all an endless repetition of retread details and the same video footage on a relentless, continuous loop. My wife and I do not have a TV and the only time I ever see it is when I am out of town teaching a workshop. It's those times when I am in a hotel and do get a glimpse of what Leonard Cohen called "that hopeless little screen", that I am very glad television is not a part of my daily life.

This photograph was not the first time I had used newspaper headlines to comment on a war with Iraq. During the Gulf War in 1991, I created a portrait project that explored different aspects of that war using a backdrop of newspaper headlines.

Man in Window

Man in Window, Prague, 1997

Another Prague image from the archives. The reason that I am currently revisiting these, 8 years after the initial trip, is that a picture editor at a magazine recently asked me to submit some shots of Eastern Europe for possible illustrations for a fiction piece. In the end they went with a different photographer, but it was a nice way for me to rediscover these images, which had been boxed up for a number of years.

Narrow Alley, Prague

Narrow Alley, Prague, 1997
[click in the image to see a larger version]

A Walk in the Park

Walk in the Park, Prague, 1997/2005

After yesterday's silly collage, I am getting back to the regular  photographic fare. This  photo was taken on the same trip to Prague as the image of the lovers on the Charles Bridge.

It was shot on film in 1997. The uneven discoloration you see was added early this year in Photoshop. I do a fair amount of electronic "hand tinting" and one of the styles I am fond of is a very loose and rough approach (perhaps I was one of those kids who did not color inside the lines).

The worn and weathered look was also added this year by scanning an old piece of beat up, scuffed and scratched plastic and then layering that scan on top of the scan of the film image. This is something that I used to do back in the days when I still had a traditional wet darkroom, either by sandwiching the scratched material with the neg, or by placing it on top of the photo paper in the easel. 

And Now For Something Completely Different...

Tub o' Lava
[click in the image see a larger, more lavalicious version]

Well, after yesterday's "serious" post and lengthy ramblings on the subject of multiple image collages, I decided it was time to post an honest to God, no holds barred, damn the torpedos, multi-image extravaganza. Actually this is only made up of just two images, so it's really not a proper extravaganza. Here's a look at the two source photos, a bathtub shot and an aerial view of Monument Valley.

Prague Lovers

Prague Lovers, 1997/2005
[click in the image for a larger version]

While walking on the Charles Bridge in Prague on a cool, late September day, I saw this couple resting together at the base of one of the statues that line the bridge. This image is from the same ongoing series as yesterday's photo. More of that series can be seen here, though this image is not yet a part of the larger collection.

This photo is a revisitation of an image shot in 1997. The original was on slide film and was a little overexposed and washed out. It is nothing I would have made a print of using a traditional Type "R", Cibachrome or Ilfochrome process. But I still liked the basic image and was able to re-interpret it recently with much more control using Photoshop. The overexposure was corrected and additional toning and selective burning and dodging brought the image back to life. Selective blurring was also applied.

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Full Disclosure & the Ethics of the Multiple Image Collage

In a couple of my online classes for the Academy of Art University in San Francisco, we have been having a lively discussion on the ethical considerations of multiple image compositing and whether or not photographers should label the images where they have engaged in some type of collage work to alert the viewer. I am not referring to basic color, tonal or focus modifications (such as the image above), but images where portions of other images are added in, or where significant elements have either been removed or significantly altered.