film – Camera Obscura

First/Last Images, by Steven Nestor

Steven Nestor — Wed, 21 Nov 2012 07:52:52 +0000

Detail from Photogram, 2012 c/o Eastman Kodak & Dwayne's Photo.
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Text and photos by Steven Nestor.

We are now universally used to and expectant of the perfect, pristine world that digital affords. For most consumers it is the only tool for photographing. If even considered, film is largely seen as being cumbersome, limiting and firmly consigned to the past. It was what most people’s early life was recorded on and certainly not part of today’s world of PS, delete or upload. When I asked 16-year-old summer students of mine if they had ever shot film, their faces frowned in puzzlement.

Shot in Trins, Austria, 1993 on Pentax K1000.
© Steven Nestor
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“You mean that thing like a little tube you used to put in the camera?”

“Yes.”

“No.” A firm answer, but still confused by the oddity of the question. It was as though I had asked them if they still drew their water from a well.

Shot in Regensburg (Koeigswiesen) in May of 1994.
© Steven Nestor
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Digital is the now, without beginning or end. There is no ‘first’ or ‘last’ image. The file numbers can go unnoticed behind concerns about pixels and megabytes. Moreover, the numbers 0, 12, 24 or 36 are utterly meaningless to most who now photograph.

When starting out in photography I avoided winding the film on to the camera dial’s first setting of frame ‘1’ so as to maximize the number of images I could take on this “little tube”. It was satisfying to squeeze as many as 39 frames out of a single roll of 36 exposures. A small victory for the dilettante. The minor risk of course was that the first frame might not “come out”. At the time, however, I don’t recall checking my negatives to see why. With an envelope of prints in the hand, that first image was either there or not. Sometimes though an overlooked sliver of an image had made it onto the negatives. Even if I did notice something was there, my eye would have skipped over it to the first complete frame.

Unknown Sky, 1994.
© Steven Nestor
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In the early years of my photography good labs were hard to come by and the results very mixed. Scratches and fingerprints on negatives were more often than not the norm. Similarly, green, red or cyanic prints were easily explained away with the magical words, “It must be the film”. What did they care?

But what happened to those first frames? Sometimes in cocking the shutter I must have wound the film just enough and missed losing the frame. On other occasions the lab may have decided to cut it off from the strip as it was “ruined” anyway. What customer would want a half burned print? The larger commercial labs would even sometimes put a small removable sticker with helpful hints onto prints showing signs of motion blur etc. Then I bought a new Nikon and ditched my old Pentax. No more manual winding. No more half frames. It automatically wound on to ‘1’ and ended at ‘36’. The shot that might not come out was eliminated. A sort of semi pace towards digital was being made in the late analogue age and the reward of getting more frames out of a roll was forgotten. I had moved up a ranking in the amateur world where equipment takes precedence over vision.

Shot in Teramo, Italy, 1999 at friend's wedding.
© Steven Nestor
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It was not until a few years ago that I was trawling through old negatives looking for images from the early 1990’s that I noticed one particular image that I had never seen before. Half of the subject – a friend in Germany – is lost in unintended exposure of the film to daylight so that the frame would have been automatically discarded in the printing process. The result is a sort of double exposure where daylight has insulted on the negative and burned off half of the frame and subject, never to be retrieved. Unmediated by lens, aperture or speed, light has triumphed destructively and a kind of ‘pyrography’ has emerged.

As a result of this find I starting using a fully manual camera more prolifically again and so automatically reverted back to trying to maximize the number of frames I could get out from a single roll. The first frame, happily compromised again, could now in many ways be the most flawless of the roll. It is also the perfect expression of analogue, of photography, of light and of destruction. And I have continued on and off with this deliberate hit and miss procedure. Either the frame is perfectly compromised or skipped. About a year or so ago I decided to examine all of the “lost”, half burnt frames I had and to see what, if anything, they might collectively say despite the diversity of time and subject matter.

Shot in Fano, Itlay, 2006.
© Steven Nestor
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Putting together this body of work I wanted to go a step beyond my fascination with old found photographs with their nostalgic and portal qualities. When working with the archieved image there are the usual questions surrounding it’s provenance, production and the issue of to what degree one restores the image. Here, however, the damage occurred at inception when I unconsciously – later deliberately – created seemingly meaningless partial frames to be later discarded. What attracts me beyond the age and personal connection to these images is the pronounced and profound element of light, which is normally and deliberately shut out for all but the briefest of moments. Whether a glow on the edge of the frame or near total erasure, these scorched images – these brilliant half-worlds – represent a moment that has been taken, that has been recorded: a singed fragment snatched from the destruction of a pyretic light.

Producers of film have always pointed out just how stable the medium is and how pigments will last for well over a century. However, the message on the box reads, ‘load in subdued light’. There is that risk of accidental exposure, of ruining the film. Light – the very basis of photography – is dangerous to the recording material. If uncontrolled, it wipes the film clean in one scorching instant, thus also obliterating what might have been a perfect frame, memory aid etc.

San Marino, 2006.
© Steven Nestor
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When initially squeezing in those extra frames I was not trying to make any sort of statement. It was when I examined that image of my friend in Germany that I saw a value and new reading of these first (and last) images. Many of these images, such as my first ever one from Austria in 1992, were only given life (or another dimension) through their partial destruction. Later, I could be deliberate with my film loading and imagine a possible reading, should the frame burn as I wanted it to. The first deliberately seared frame to work the way I hoped was that of the main railway station in Turin, taken on Kodachrome 64. I can read it – enjoy it – on a purely superficial level, or, given that it is the last year of Kodachrome, see it as a comment on the end of a specific era as well as reflecting on the fragility of the present.

Unknown Light.
© Steven Nestor
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This semi-erasure also captures the essence of how memory selects and sorts. What did I remember of a day trip to San Marino in 2006? Shafts of light through a non-descript church window. A man with a placard protesting his innocence in front of the palace. This almost completely erased frame of the San Marino landscape perfectly illustrates to me that vague, faded memory of a view I had stopped to photograph, to snap. It is confirmation that memory, in unison with time, is forever falling from our grasp and from what our eyes are projecting inwards. Although by depressing the shutter release we may be pausing time continuum, by also including the moment of destruction these images challenge the delusion of the alleged power of photography to halt time, to preserve memory.

While seemingly bland, even completely pointless, the most recent ‘first frame’ was particularly pleasing to produce and offered far more than I had imagined when standing in front of the subject. Firstly, there was the intrigue of encountering the Safe Surrender Site in the small mountain community of Groveland, California. Here an unwanted baby may be surrendered within three days of being born without fear of prosecution. Obviously there is an official sign indicating the presence of a surrender site, but what did I actually see and remember? What might the mother recall of the site when abandoning her baby? The sign? Or maybe the neatly coiled umbilical like hose at the side of the fire station? This resulting half burned image testifies that I was at the site, framed and recorded it. However, I only remember that hose. That’s what struck in my mind. And that’s what was left in the recording process. That neatly coiled hose descends from a permanent erasure.

Shot on Kodachrome in Turin, Italy, 2009.
© Steven Nestor
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Going through my 30+ images I was reminded of another facet to this work. As many writers on photography have pointed out, the specter of death is something we experience when reviewing photographs and catching a glimpse of where we are going by seeing were we no longer are. Here, however, that flicker of the end has been at once augmented and usurped. Not only is there that eternally snatched moment from the past, but there is now a new dimension: the eternal moment of destruction of the film and partial erasure of that which has been framed. Although there certainly exists a link between the specter of death and photography, these first (and “last”) images also contain in equal measure both destruction and a curious chanced beauty. The coincidental burning of the frame and the moment tempers life’s moribund condition and animates that spared fragment.

Home. Shot in Dublin, Ireland, 2012.
© Steven Nestor
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Because, like us, film is physical, delicate and subject to aging (rather than corruption in digital), and because life has only one conclusion, I feel that these compromised moments are the more beautiful for it. The message cannot be said to be exclusively one of demise; rather it is the curiosity of the partially singed frame, the partial recall. The destructive and unregulated element of light animates this otherwise ‘flat death’, sending a spike into the two-dimensional plane. While the chance or deliberate ‘yellow and/or red edging’ can be read as a manifestation of a loss of memory and time, it is also death’s competitor through a beautiful distraction: thus, distraction via destruction. It is now (and for the lifetime of the eternal moment) a new first message, obscuring what is usually reserved for primacy of place.

Shot in Piemonte, Italy, 2011.
© Steven Nestor
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When digital first arrived I offhandedly rejected it. For me it was cheap and nasty and I became immediately despondent for the seemingly immanent demise of analogue. However, digital’s near complete dominance of the photographic world has conversely injected more life into analogue than analogue itself could ever have done alone. Analogue’s great “nemesis” has pushed the user closer to their preferred medium, prompting a fuller exploration of film as seen for example in the work of Miroslav Tichý or Tacita Dean. Those still choosing film over digital are free to embrace and exploit its physical limits and flaws, whereas in the past such compromised frames as these First/Last Images would more likely than not have been rejected out-of-hand or cropped to exclude the unwanted “damage”.

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Safe Surrender.
© Steven Nestor
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Apparitions, photography by Gérard Castello-Lopes

Gonzalo Bénard — Sun, 08 Jul 2012 17:04:17 +0000

#1 © Gérard Castello-Lopes
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To understand an artist’s work you can’t keep your eye stuck only on the image that’s worth a thousand words, and Camera Obscura gave me a click on this sentence, making me go deeper and beyond. A week ago I couldn’t avoid going to an exhibition held here in Paris, at the Centre Gulbenkian (French delegation of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation in Lisbon), and if you’re coming here, please do yourself a favour and go see it!

Gérard Castello-Lopes was born in Vichy in 1925, son of the cinema (his father, José Castello-Lopes, founder of Filmes Castello-Lopes) and music (his mother, Marie-Antoinette Lévéque, piano player), spending most of his life living in Lisbon – or between Lisbon and Paris -, being himself a disciple of Henri Cartier-Bresson.

#2 © Gérard Castello-Lopes
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I knew his work since always – I guess that I have less years of life than he dedicated to photography – but always felt something was missing for me to understand his whole work. It can be understood perfectly well the influence of the music on his work, specially piano, as he was a great piano player and composer himself, and also co-founder of the Lisbon Hot Club, the Lisbon jazz spot. This, you will find on the lines and rhythms and compositions (photo #1).

#3 © Gérard Castello-Lopes
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It can also be perfectly visible the influence he had from the cinema, in the use of light (also from Cartier-Bresson, using natural light), composition, stolen stills from a film. But still… there was something I didn’t know: his main passion and hobby and where it all began:

Water.

Under Water.

#4 © Gérard Castello-Lopes
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Gérard Castello-Lopes was a passionate autonomous diver. From the Ocean to the sea, the Atlantic to the Mediterranean, where he learned how to dive (Cannes) or near Lisbon, where he lost his friend and diver colleague Philippe Cousteau. And it was when diving that he starts doing photography with his French Foca.

Suddenly it all made sense to me, so I went back to the exhibition’s rooms to review all his main work. It’s true that he had an amazing work of light, as I wrote before natural light taught by his (our) master Cartier-Bresson. Even though there’s a huge difference of lights as the light of Lisbon is much warmer than the light of Paris. I experienced that already in my own photographic work. However, Castello-Lopes’ light is different. It’s not the usual light of Lisbon or Paris. He, somehow, brings the underwater light to his photography giving to it a special mood very characteristic on his work. That was exactly the feeling I had when seeing his exhibited work: diving in submerged cities, where water isn’t an issue for us to breath.

#5 © Gérard Castello-Lopes
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His view, or the view that he gives us is not only through his camera lenses but also through his diving armour’s glass, as if he had the gift of taking us to the place making us living and feeling it as he did.

There are photographs that you feel diving through submerged places, finding living humans there or just their presence even though being all them existing on the surface, and when on the earth’s surface feeling he brings water puddles (photos #2 and #3) or glass reflections, to give some water mood as well.

Gérard Castello-Lopes started taking photography while diving, but soon he realised that was not so easy, also for the camera as it had immediately to go through several complicated processes of cleaning the camera even if he had a supposed waterproof metal case with flash, so his photographs really under water became more as a frustration to him.

On the photograph taken in Scotland, 1985, (photo #4) there are two kids throwing pieces of bread to flying seagulls, however, the image I “saw” was the 3 seagulls as swimming fishes reflected on sky. A play of sea and sky, as if the sky was showing the reflection of the sea and not the opposite, that he repeated in other photographs like the one he took in Chambord, France (photo #5), in 1984.

Castello-Lopes projects this way his underwater world to ours.

He also brought kids diving, as I’m sure he saw them and projected them as so, even if they were just jumping and playing on any street (photos #6 and #7). They both appear to be diving and playing in deep ocean.

Or the photograph with the 4 priests sit down on a bench talking (photo #8), like corals in a reef, with such aquatic and organic movement they have.

And the “mermaid” looking lost as any human-fish at “Dubonnet’s sea”, taken in Paris, in 1957 (photo #9).

From the magnificent portrait of his mother taken in 1959 (photo #10), the piano player as a reflected bust lost and found next to a sank boat under the Mediterranean waters that he could have take while diving… to the photo he took already with his feet on earth, from above, watching the body submerged, in 1998, (photo #11) when it seems that he finally assumes he is out of his main element. He feels his feet on the ground now, after he got married and become a father of two. He explores earth.

And here on earth, he shoots his photograph that I like the most, in Paris, 1985. (photo #12). Probably one of his most abstract images, inviting you to be there. In this one, if you’re a follower of the rules, you’ll be disappointed, as it seems that he broke them all. Even the basic rule of thirds. The main subject is on your left side. It reminds me another one, taken by Cindy Sherman, where there’s a lonely lady on the left, leaving the line-curve on the right so you can feel yourself there, or even a blank space for someone who’s yet to arrive.

Some people can break all the rules: they are called masters.

Patterns were also something that attracted Castello-Lopes. But not to be repeated. They existed to be different, even if this can seem awkward or non-sense. He doesn’t photograph a pattern; he gives us the concept of patterns. Like they exist in nature, or the walls created by seaweeds creating patterns that don’t exist… as a pattern. But as a whole. So that’s what he also brought, shooting ropes left at the sand by fishermen, or even trails left by their boats, wheels and feet. Or coming out from the sea and sand, already at the urban landscape the scaffolding that is used to build, with men and by men. And with men, is also the iconic photograph of them all turned back, in line, bending, looking at the sea. In Algarve, 1957 (photo #13).

His marriage with Daniéle and the birth of his two children (daughter and son), brought him out of water, giving him a new universe, even if he never stopped diving in his mind and way of seeing. He was living on earth.

He now enjoys another element: Fire. Finally. That he started discovering with his series of blood at the bullfights, and later on with his other colour series of the burning scare crows (1996) (photo #14).

If there is a need to cut Gérard Castello-Lopes photographic chronology in 2 parts -due to his marriage and the birth of their 2 children-, there’s a first part where he never left the Water, even if using the Air element to reflect it, and the second part -after being married and becoming a father-, where he is connected with Earth. And finally Fire. Scaring the crows. Playing Jazz.

Visit Gérard Castello-Lopes (1925-2011) exposition Apparitions (photography 1956-2006) curated by Jorge Calado. Centre Gulbenkian, Paris from April 25th to October 25th 2012.