Man In The White Suit

Brenda tells me that this series, started originally on Flickr, but now moved to Ipernity and still growing, should be posted here too. I’ve decided though to write about the background to the pictures and let them speak for themselves.

They started life as ORWO slides. ORWO was an East German film with I think an ASA of 50. It produced incredibly saturated colours if slightly underexposed. Unfortunately, as light levels fell, you had to underexpose even more to keep the saturation. That coupled with very poor processing standards (miscut, mismounted, watermarks, scratches, creases) meant that my fascination with it was short lived.

Coming back to these slides some 30 years later, I find the slides have not just faded, but physically deteriorated too. They have developed mould spots and in places the emulsion is coming away from the film backing. I have started to scan them without, for now at least, doing much in the way of post scan processing. That is boring though, so I can’t resist working on them. The problem of course is that time spent in digital restoration is time in which the decay continues.

I found - by accident to be honest - that the best looking images are monochrome. Brenda called them ‘recreations’ but that isn’t my aim in making them mono, they just look better that way. The fading has left a strong blue cast, that my limited digital skills heve been unable to remove and this is of course lost in the mono versions. In making the mono versions I have tended to go for darker images than the colour originals.

I am not losing the colour versions however - I restore as far as I can in colour and then start again in mono. The spotting and scratch removal is done at a magnification of at least 300%, zooming in and out to make sure no inadvertant artefacts are created. At the time of writing there are I think 8 images in the set but I have another dozen or so to finish spotting, scratch removal and conversion to mono. with perhaps another 70 still to scan. I have no idea what the unscanned ones will turn out like, but I would be surprised if more than half are usable, either because the image is a near duplicate or doesn’t work or because the slide has suffered too much damage. Everything is scanned though, regardless of condition.

I have to confess that this particular image is not really original, although it remains one of my favourites from the set. I saw the same composition first in the Guardian, taken by either Don McPhee or Denis Thorpe (both masters of newspaper photography) and I recognised it immediately when I walked across the top of the street.

I’m looking forward to having the full set assembled. I have it in mind to make a video with them (like this one) and I would love to see them in a more conventional gallery display. I can’t afford to get gallery prints done though, and inkjet prints of mono images are not entirely satisfactory unless you have a dedicated mono printer.

EDIT: The proportions of the embedded photo are slightly askew - it is too tall relative to the width and being new to Wordpress I can’t work out how to correct it.

EDIT2: Fixed by manually editing the image size in the HTML code. Is there an easier way?

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 11th, 2007 at 2:45 pm and is filed under 35mm, black and white, techniques. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.