#cafenol

[markentwisle]

a tree in the snow #olympuspen #cafenol #filmsnotdead #believeinfilm #analogue (at Hampstead Heath)

[markentwisle]

Parliament hill. #filmsnotdead #believeinfilm #35mm #parliamenthill #hampsteadheath #freezing #cafenol #ilfordhp5 (at Hampstead Heath)

[time-of-objects]

Home darkroom experiments

Lucky for me I have a laundry without windows which makes for a perfect home darkroom. I am very fortunate that I can continue working during home lockdown periods such as the one I am in now. Spending hours in a small darkened room does start to wear on one so any bits of gear that allow for working with a light on is a bonus. The drum machine I bought a many years ago. It took a bit of luck to find a suitable drum to fit on it many months later. The drum can fit one 8 x 10 sheet in it and 75ml of developer. A tiny amount of developer compared to tray developing which requires about a litre. Another added bonus of this machine is the constant agitation reduces development time, welcomed when using a slow developer like caffenol. I often flip between moving camera and still camera work but it had been years since I printed on paper. The Olive Cotton Award encouraged me to take this up again as well as home lockdown. I have all sorts of projects mid flight and producing them in parallel means you build connections between projects where none might have existed before.

Printing on larger paper has given me a taste for bigger works that I want to pursue in the UOW darkroom. I have bought a range of different cut sizes and also a wide paper roll to pursue l long panoramic lengths. Working with long strips with of moving picture film (like the previous post explored) lead me to want to print long lengths of paper. The photo paper acting like fossils of the moving film negative. The technicalities of enlargement and development of long paper rolls will be a large challenge. I think the drum machine might be useful in this context. Perhaps if I get some lengths of sewage pipe (wider than standard pluming pipe) I could load the lengths of film in this and use the drum machine rolling action to develop in the pipe. It would mean less chemicals and less time. Another advantage of drum machine development is supposedly consistent results. Recent tests on 8 x 10 paper have not quite had consistent results with some streaking and different exposure values apparent but it would be worth exploring. The paper rolls are pretty expensive so I will want to be fairly certain before I throw the whole lot in.

I am reminded how access and affordance influence the direction of creative work. I remember being very frustrated as a young person about access to gear and opportunities. Perhaps this has left its mark on me so that when I come across a machine drum or a unknown camera I get excited by possibilities.

[time-of-objects]

Bellambi jetty 2021

This image was taken on a Rollei 16S. A compact camera that can take up 18 shots on 50cms of 16mm perforated film. I have a growing collection of cameras still and moving. I come across an unknown old camera and become excited about what the possibilities of chance could happen inside the little light tight box. When there can be no manual to be found it highlights the cameras intuitive design. James Gibson coined the term affordance to explore the idea that our perception system is built in relation to our environment. We perceive texture, surface and objects in our environment in such a way that intuits their use. Attending to a cliff, it affords a dropping off place, a surface at knee height is a sitting down place and so on. Applying this concept to my Rollei 16S; the little camera affords companion in tight spaces (my kayak) because it is tiny and weights next to nothing, it intuits an extended panorama along a jetty because the film is loaded horizontally which leads one to think of what you might photograph along its 50cm long surface. Perceptual artists who concern themselves with medium specificity and agency will be familiar with this idea that certain machines or materials just want to behave a certain way. You might say my Rollei 16S wanted to take a multiple frame picture of the jetty.

[time-of-objects]

Seal re-animated

Today I found out a seal, I saw resting on Bulli beach on the weekend, had died. Sad news after my excitement of seeing the seal alive when I had been photographing a dead one that had washed up on a neighbouring beach. I had begun a drawing with a razor on the negative of the seal in an attempt to re-animate it. This morning I decided to finished the drawing in remembrance of the two dead seals.

A sombre thing to do and as is often when one is in the flow of making something with your hands loose themes of my research drifted through my mind. Writing them down here I attempt to catch them as they form.

Drawing on negative film your eye has two main places to rest its gaze; on the line work of the drawing or the photographic image. When scanning an image you make creative decisions by manipulating exposure. Tweaking the values of the blacks, you loose the photographic image and the line work dominates. Pull in the direction of the shadows, the line work recedes and the photographic image of the negative dominates. I wanted to have both the photographic image and the line work present so your eye can choose where to look. Trying to both reminds me of the duck/rabbit illusion. I have been collecting writing about the duck/rabbit problem mainly because in film making it is often about tweaking the dials of what comes into the fore and what is reduced to the background. When working with analogue film the visual reference to surface is nearly always constant; marks such as dust or scratches, and the composition of the film grain. These textural elements are present as well as the photographic image. Making the seal images reminded me creative work here has more fruit to bare to tease out implications of the duck/rabbit phenomenon.

Another line of thinking to pursue with this multi frame image is how the composition of frames relate to each other as a narrative, in the way a comic book might. Comic book frames fascinate me because they have a temporal quality yet don’t have a set duration. It is the missing elements (the spaces in-between) that lend the experience of reading a comic book to perceiving time? Are missing pieces of perception key to experiencing time? This seems contradictory. How can something not witnessed help us perceive time? James Gibson put motion at the heart of his concept of natural vision and his theories are my testing ground for my research. Gibson writes that his concept for vision is ambulatory - perception is motion and exploratory. Applying Gibson thought to reading a comic book might be to take a walk across the images, leap over the distance from one frame to another and in doing so we perceive time. Gibson when discussing time wrote “(w)e should be thinking of events as the primary realities and of time as an abstraction from them - a concept derived mainly from regular repeating events, such as the ticking of clocks. Events are perceived, but time is not.” (Gibson, pg 91). My initial instinct for research into what working with analogue film brings to film making was that the physical properties of film, the fact you could hold a length of film in your hand gives you a sense of time as a tangible element - an object. This was the main thread in naming my research time-of-objects. Perhaps holding lengths of film as if it is an object of time is the misdirection of analogue film.

[time-of-objects]

Tools for making images move.

Multi-frame Self-close (Crowe, 2021) lends it self to animation not surprisingly as it is built with the tools for making moving images. The animated images are made by digital scanning the analogue negative, inverting the image and laying it up in the timeline using digital editing software. The animated technique is similar to an approach I took while making Written on the body (Crowe, 2016). The animation brings the mechanical nature of the moving image to the fore. It has a creepy undertone to it. The image of my eye catches a reflection of the light source in my glasses as well as organic shapes. I first thought the organic shapes must be the magnification of my iris but I came to believe it was the reflection of the plants outside my window. The Bolex film camera I used has an unmovable eyepiece. You can only look through it if you are behind the camera (most digital cameras have a moveable screen that you might tilt towards yourself or stand apart from). Being a self portrait I was facing a mirror to help me see what I was doing and provide extra illuminance. My beady eye looks out from behind organic shapes, the twisted shape of LED globes and the technology of my glasses.

James Gibson wrote briefly on film making discussing the similarities and dissimilarities between editing and camera movement and how we perceive our environment through movement at the end of Ecological Approach to Perception (1979). Gibson, a physiologist, has impacted many diverse fields. His ideas have provided a sounding board from me in my hope to investigate what analogue film making processes can tell us about film making in the broader sense. Writing in at the end of the 1970’s he was not convinced by the technique of the jump-cut seen in film and television. In 2021 the jump cut is not new, it has become the air we breathe in moving media. If the jump cut breaks “the unities of time and space” (Gibson, pg 286) then my creepy image moving up and down trees aided by a ladder or moving up and down my own face aided by an animation stand, also breaks these unities. Tools such as the ladder and the animation stand become part of the work as does the mechanisms of placing one image after another in an edit. The mechanics of the moving image show up more readily in Written one the body and Multi-frame Self-close because I have misdirected them. Reassembling the intention of conventual filmmaking I preform the machine. The result is a kind of mechanical eye. Creepy because it is more technology than biology.

Why does technology provoke mistrust and unease? Is a question raised in Thinking Through Technology by Carl Mitcham (1994) that I have been reading recently. Mitcham considers hand tools and power tools, as well as technology as process and this history of the term machine and how this has changed in tune with the industrial revolution till now (or rather 1994). A hand tool such as a blade made from a rock has a connection to the body; marks acted on an object are performed by the energy of personhood. A power tool driven by energy, not of the human body, distances the maker from the thing being worked on by non-human energy, the marks have a different performance value. The knowledge of texture and density has also been numbed between maker and object. Making the distinction between “the world of the screen” (Mitcham, pg 191) and the world of hand tools is useful in thinking about analogue film in the digital era. Film and digital filmmaking have in common that they are artworks built on and of technology. The divide between film processes and digital processes can be thought of in degrees of personhood through touch, texture and surface. A person leaves traces of themselves through the tools they use. The tool leaves traces of itself too.

Gibsonian ideas and Mitcham’s survey of technology has got me thinking that making with analogue or digital tools is in degrees of how much we are involved in the business of the machine. Gibson also wrote about tools. He noted that when handled, a tool such as a pair of scissors becomes the extension of the hand (Gibson, pg 35). A piece of clothing is part of the body until it is discarded and hangs on the back of a chair. He makes this distinction to examine the shifting space between object and environment and subjective and objective thought. Something graspable is of the body until it is out there in the environment. Analogue film apparatus of moving parts and chemistry is something physical. You get your hands dirty in it. It is in proportion to our experience of the world. Digital devices have shorn off texture, they are flat shiny boxes that easily slip through our fingers. You can tinker in the innards of digital devices (if you have knowledge of code or a soldering iron) attempting to manipulate the company locked software. Artists who work with analogue film talk of their process in terms of craft with artisan undertones. A digital artist can also tinker with the materiality of ones and zeros but they might not so easily cosy up to the ‘artisan’ label. The energy driving a digital device, the electron is by definition moving parts but at a different scale to the human body. Can a photochemical film technology be artisan or organic because it can be readily adapted by hand? Isn’t this all a matter of degrees and why should it matter? Our relationship to technology and how it impacts the way we interact with our world, can provide feedback of our changing relationship to our environment. Tinkering around with what the machine produces can show these things up. Making with the moving parts of the analogue apparatus during the unstoppable rise of digital synthetic media, helps us examine our world produced and understood by our constant and changing companion; technology.  

[time-of-objects]

This image came from building on the sequential frame idea of my original self close portrait submitted to the Olive Cotton Award. Using the same camera and lens, (this time using hi-contrast film rated at 25 ASA) I framed myself not as two eyes in one frame and ears in the next but much closer so one eye can only fit in one frame. While I have written about the relative concepts of size and scale in the hang and the process and how one might represent this in a gallery I didn’t mention other themes that surround the image. One was that the portrait is focused on the sense organs of eyes and ears. A lot of my reading for the research into visual perception has explored the senses. What they do and how they interact with our environment to make sense of ours selfs as we move through space. The mouth is missing in the self close (Crowe 2020) -not necessarily an intentional decision but later I reflected that one could connect this to the pandemic - our mouths are constantly removed from vision hidden behind our masks. While making and thinking about the mulit-framed portrait I was reading Sue Cataldi’s book Emotion, depth, and flesh: a study of sensitive space; reflections on Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy of embodiment  (1993). As the title suggests she takes Merleau-Ponty’s ideas about embodiment as well as James Gibson’s idea of affordances to look at depth as an emotional landscape. She lists many instances where depth lurks when we describe our emotions. We say we are deeply moved for instance. A challenge for making the multi-frame portrait was how to manage and explore the extreme depth of field with the lens I was using. As the Bolex has no kind of vlog screen to point towards myself  - that a digital camera might provide - instead I had to rely on a tape measure to set the focus. I knew most of the image would be ‘out’ of focus but that I would capture great detail in other parts. I thought this might be interesting to capture the extreme end of the resolution of the lens and Cataldi’s discussion of Gibson ideas - that there is no empty space but always stuff that we swim in. Being in and out of focus in this portrait becomes something that is felt visually.

The broad intention of my research is to examine what analogue 16mm film practices bring to film making and object making. From this stance there is a path towards testing out what multiple frames can do and what they can’t. Particularly when you examine this while reading and thinking about visual perception in our natural environment. Adding a 16mm camera to perceiving we add another element to perceiving which - in the Gibson sense - has its own affordance. Testing out the similarities and the dissimilar qualities of natural perception and perceiving with a camera leads to a kind of structuralist stance. My interest is to explore what a photo-chemical sprocket-ed recording surface and its machine carrier bring to perceiving. In the structuralist sense it provides a frame work to explore time, surface and the body. But here I have attempted to take away the assumed intention of the Bolex 16mm motion camera to record a portrait on an animation stand to see what else it affords. The result is similar to my tree portraits in Written on the Body (Crowe, 2016) the visual representation leaves more obvious mechanical traces to the image. The act of the recording is shown for what it is. A mechanical eye scanning over a textured surface. A kind of photo-chemical rubbing of ‘empty’ space.  

[time-of-objects]

The top image is a screenshot taken from the Tweed Regional Gallery facebook page. My image is on the white wall, closest to the corner (”that’s me in the corner” a line from a REM song emerges in my mind). As all of NSW goes into lockdown this week this will be as close as I get to the exhibition. It is interesting for me to consider size looking at the group show hang. All of the participants have no idea about the size, shape, colour, and framing intentions of the other entrants. It surprised me at first to see the little picture there in contrast to the other large images, considering from my concept; this was a big picture of a little thing, a blow up of a tiny 16mm image. The second image is a photo I took of my submission framed and wrapped in plastic for shipping to the gallery. My intention was to explore the sequential nature of 16mm moving picture film as an object on paper.

The process of making the image is a useful illustration of how the limits of your resources and the medium provide a design structure for the end result. I used a Bolex and a close up bellows lens to take these images of myself. I hand processed the film in caffenol and printed the film in my home laundry/darkroom with a 35mm enlarger. The film I used was expired, likely at least 40 years old. This means I had to open up my aperture by at least 4 stops (one stop per decade). I was unsure of how I should also compensate for the bellows on the macro lens. A bellows lens usually means you should open up the aperture to allow for light to travel down the lens to the film. All of this meant the shoot was not exactly straight forward; I struggled to get enough light to get near what I needed according to my light meter. The negative came out rather thin which would prove to create some challenges on the enlarger but I ended up welcoming the softness because of the thin negative which for me had the combined effect of the clarity of the lens. A kind of contradiction on film. Size was limited to my home resources. My home enlarger globe is not the brightest and I only have 8 x 10 trays so my first print was thus. 16mm is also half the size of 35mm so to make the 16mm lens fill the 8 x 10 paper I found I had to turn the stand around and point it at the floor. On a small stool I propped an enlarger easel. Focussing was a challenge because the negative was so thin. I have a focus checker (don’t know the formal name for this) which allows you to examine the grain close up. Awkward but doable. My test strips told me I needed at least a 10 minute exposure wide open. This is what I did for my submission. All these steps in one day, the last day to submit an image to the award. A month or so later I found I got in and there was an allowance for people to change the intended size of their submission with permission this is what I did. I felt size was key to my exploration of blowing up 16mm film onto paper.

In June I lined up time at the University of Wollongong (UOW) darkroom (thanks Tom!) and bought some larger paper that I could afford. Not quite as large as I wanted but big enough to be larger than life portrait and a good deal larger compared to the 16mm film gauge, a negative not even 2 cms in length or height. The UOW enlarger was turned to floor to achieve a greater size and weighted with bricks. The largest easel in the darkroom provided a clean edge for composing the image on the paper. With the brighter globe on the UOW enlarger meant I could bring down my exposure to 2 minutes. Adjusting the tone of the photo on fibre based paper (my first print at home was on a pearl lustre) I adjusted the multi-filters to get close to what I had in mind. This took two full days. Spending time in the darkroom ones eyes become accustomed to a different way of seeing. Your mind tries to allow for this. Seeing in the red glow of the room you tell your self oh that tone is not quite deep enough or the highlights are too far gone. All of this these are fuzzy held concepts that the bright light of day dispels. Feeling slight deflated after day one I re-examined the test prints on day two and saw them in a different manner and came to what the paper, chemicals, negative, multifilters, my decisions as well as time had provided. Time is counted in seconds in the darkroom but also in months and days. My first print is fairly clean for a hand processed image, however my final print made a month later has sat around, been pulled in and out of camera mechanisms, Lomo tank spirals, drying racks and enlargers. Somewhere along the process my imprecise handling it had become scratched. A mark of time and of practice.

All this physical labour re-enforced my intention to make a hand manipulated still image from with a machine built for capturing time and motion. Seeing the image small next to the bigger digital prints I learnt that in a gallery setting bigger makes sense but also starts to loose its connection from whence the image came. Time of Objects - a concept that I am trying to build in my research always turns to surface, the physicality of what can be held and to process. Does this have a place in a gallery setting?

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