Polaroid – Camera Obscura

Pinhole polaroid porn and umigraphy portraits, by Arnoud Bakker

Arnoud Bakker — Wed, 08 Sep 2010 19:28:47 +0000

Text and photography by Arnoud Bakker.

A thousand words, thats what they told me, a thousand and otherwise they will not publish my thoughts and works. I think that’s fair. By telling and thinking, a thousand is just enough to explain what I think I’m doing.

As I was raised and educated as a photographer, that was like 12 years ago, when I finished Art academy, ARTez (the AKI) in Enschede (NL). I loved the darkroom that time, and I made myself a way, -by making kind of collage-like-big-paper-and-stuff-negatives- to create a world that was mine, without the -It just looks like- look… No, by being extreme with tape, cutting, and glueing, it went beyond that. It became a new reality for me.

While considering the fact that photography was still analogue in that time. A couple of years later the digital revolution was a fact, and everything became possible. With a digicam, a CF, photoshop and some patience.

Although I’m not a purist, I noticed that I didn’t felt comfortable with the new situation. I had the feeling that I was pulled in this digi-race in order to survive. But the uniqueness of an image had been degraded to zero. Nowadays every file can be copied a thousand times. Black and white pictures are printed on PE color paper.
And every minor unwanted detail can, -and will be – erased by the easy power of the clone-stamp. I didn’t believed the digital photo anymore. It even looked like people didn’t believed photography anymore.

Once there was a time, people believed photography, you could see that it was real, because it was on the picture itself, that was the proof, and otherwise it could not have been made. Now the time had come for me to decide to continue analogue photography.

Also the fact that analogue had been replaced by digital, didn’t meant that photography was explored in every way. Actually there was, -and still is- a lot of unexplored areas in photography.

I started to combine several processes. Common processes, but just combined in a different way, so new possibility’s announced.

The day the umigraphy was born. Named after a huge repro-camera, the “umigraff” (Actually I “invented” it a long time ago, but back than I didn’t felt the need to use it right away because of an overdoses of other techniques). But now It gave me the back possibilities to create valuable photo’s . The pictures became little objects again, precious, and because of the absence of a negative, they are uniques.

The beautiful silver soaked paper, that is in the camera (mainly 8 x 10″ ) during the exposure, is also the final print. Touched by the light that was there during the photo-moment, as if the paper is a silent whiteness. The photo, as if it has stolen a little of the light, and a little of the soul, of the one who is portrayed. Just like in the old times, when the Indians were afraid of being portrayed, afraid to loose their souls.

On the other hand, it gives me as a mortal, the opportunity to get a kind of grip at life, by collecting all these small pieces of soul. As if the models, the young women, kind of trust me with a piece of them. It gives me an affirmation of my existence.

* * *

An other project I have been working on is a “pinhole polaroid porn project”. As there is a lot of disciplines in photography, pinhole is one that has my interest as well. It’s a magical thing, to catch light. Perhaps even more because the instruments being used are primitive, self build and understandable. A perfect tool for light catchers in the purest form. Funny thing though, is the fact that porn is an underexposed subject for pinhole users. So I decided to explore the possibility’s of it.

I realized the ‘inconvenient’ side-effects of the camera obscura. Extremely long exposure times, a blur because of a lack of lens, and unsharpness because of movement. On the other hand, I was happy to see the first results. because its dimness. Its that effect that makes it more comfortable to look at the pictures. They became a kind of paintings. Man can say the project is a “failure” cause no matter how hard I try, the important ingredients for porn are missing.

Because of the exposure times, face expressions, become less intense, and the razer sharp pink colored skin has turned soft and greenish, by the behavior of long exposure on Polaroid. In order to get a little sharpness, I desired to use flash now and then, when I thought it was needed.

The profit in use of Polaroid, man can immediately see the results. And still there is a lot of unexpected coincidences and surprises involved with this material. But also the uniqueness of Polaroid and the light-catch story as told above are important for me.

As has been written in my photobook “Atropa bella donna”¹ “Arnoud Bakker is an alchemist who wants to create golden girls on paper”.

I try to combine a ‘perfect’ woman, and by collecting all kind of different aspects of women, I catch their light, their soul, their sexuality, their forms, in a stereographic way, their moves in small pieces of 8 mm film.

I will try to get it all, with one camera, with two camera’s, with big camera’s with small camera’s. I want their winks, their moments, their eyes, their light, mouths, tooth, their scars, their skin. I want their braveness, and their naivety. I try to order them in rows, as if I make an archive. A collection. And how things can be overwhelming like in a museum for example.

Once there was a time, I was not aware of what I was looking for, I was fascinated and restless, but couldn’t explain what I was searching for. Actually that was a good condition to be in.

The more I try to explained what I’m doing, the more it looses it’s magic, the search for a destiny, is as important for me as reaching the destiny itself. I think this , “the-Frankenstein-put-everything-together-project” as you might call it, will be a lifelong project.

Might be a bit strange for one, but I think it’s just too beautiful.

For more photography please visit Arnoud Bakker website.

Atropa bella donna, Arnoud Bakker, published by Noorderlicht, isbn 978-9076703-39-8.

Saltwater River Guard, by Mikael Kennedy

Mikael Kennedy — Fri, 18 Jun 2010 13:51:00 +0000

Text and photographs by Mikael Kennedy.

‘when I take the prisoners swimming,
they have the time of their lives,
I love to watch them, floating, on their backs
unburdened, and relaxed’

‘River Guard’ by Bill Callahan

I don’t remember why Joe flew in from SF, but after a few days of the city we climbed in the van and drove north. Joe had a family friend who leaves their house open in Vermont. Mike was staying with a girl on the other side of the mountain, just over the Lincoln gap so we started meeting up in the middle, hiking up to the locals only leentoo; we’d sit and watch the valley. We’d all grown up here, I was an east coaster, from over another mountain, down in the valley, Mike and Joe were from round this side.

Who knows how long Mike had been up here, I hadn’t seen him in NYC in probably a year, truth was I couldn’t remember the last time I’d seen him, not since we drove 54 hours straight from Oregon back to the city to catch a friends folk show, we’d stopped talking for awhile after that. Corey was over Bar Harbor near the edges of Maine, no one knew why he was up there, he’d left the city months earlier but we started to hear rumors that he may show up any day.

Dylan was a new one, he’d been killing time on an island off the coast of New Hampshire waiting tables at an old resort, he had finally quit a few days before and sent word he’s be coming through after he visited his uncles farm in Montpelier. I met Dylan in North Carolina, first time through a girl I was dating, then again when he lived in Boston with me for a time being till he got in a bike accident and up and left one day with some of my favorite books on a bus back down south. No one really liked Boston.

Hell, Noah was the longest run, he’d heard we were all there and drove down all night from Toronto just for a day. Dirt roads where the dust kicks up in storms behind your tires, we had a 30 rack in back, we told the local kids to stop doing back flips off the rocks cause we weren’t fishing no bodies out of the quarry today, just jump off the lower rocks and be satisfied.

Maine is a new frontier, a quieter space, the shoreline stretching farther than the coast of California. I’d been returning here, there and again over the past few years, Daniel and I rode the ferry out to Peaks Island for the Sacred and Profane festival; one day a year when artists take over the old abandoned army base on the far side of the island.

Toby and his wife were there installing a windharp in one of the old tunnels, Robin ran through the crowd to hug me and say this was the reason she’d moved to Maine; she’d stumbled upon this years before and never left. A ferry ride full of mad men through the bay in the early rain, onto the dock and marching through the streets across the little island. I met a man there who a year later would tattoo a compass on my wrist, and another man who would give me a free darkroom to print my show in. There is a house just north of here called the Salt Water Farm where Annemarie lives, having escaped the City, we sleep in the guest room and take her dogs for walks on the shore.

We drove three hours through the pouring rain to knock on her door one night, we’d never met her before, just heard of the place, Jon would meet us there and take us to the top of Megunticook mountain where we could look out at the floor of the world through the mist and the salt spray reaching from the waves. I watched his pup run through the red of the blueberry bushes and we stood out on cliffs till we got scared.

The Odysseus began on a mountaintop in New Mexico. We lived in Bill Gersh’s old adobe commune at 9,000 feet. Jessica and Justin were there all winter, Jenn, Mike and I wandered in for a few weeks and then wandered out as seemed to be the nature of things.

I was sick of the city. It doesn’t take much for that to happen these days. I had been 5 years of living in New York, beginning in a friends closet and moving up to a room on the top floor that faced east. 5 years of saving every penny and buying tickets out of here, I’d never lived somewhere that I have fled with such passion before, returning to again and again. I used to call it the ‘castle & the kingdom’: the castle was here, all cement and steel, the kingdom was out there, on the roads, in the hills, the low houses, the kingdom was where I felt free.

Mike and I had spent 5 weeks living out of a car the spring before, driving a mad circle around the country, Jenn had settled into studies in Iowa, before that she was in New Jersey, and New York, and New Hampshire, every where could be a new place. Now Jenn and I flew into Albequerque from different directions. There was a note in her pocket “tan Volvo, new mexico, plates, key on front tire, I25- N to the Enchanted Cirlce, 84 – 68, just north of Taos find the road to Lama.”

We found the car and drove north, till we got lost talking. I had a compass in my pocket that told me we were heading south, we had gone too far. I spent my days just hiking the mountain, we’d walk with cameras through stream beds, the mountain had burnt down years before, the charded timbers rising over our heads. Eventually we were wading through knee deep snow scrambling up the mountainside. We never could reach the top.

At night we’d sit and drink whiskey by the fire till one night Mike and I almost got in a fistfight and I said the conversations were over.

For more photographs please visit Mikael Kennedy website and passport to trespass, a polaroid journey Mikael Kennedy have been on for many years.

Estamos Buscando A – We’re Looking For, by Paul Turounet

Paul Turounet — Sun, 31 May 2009 07:30:35 +0000

Retablo Nº1 – Unidentified Migrant, Tijuana, Baja California Norte, Mexico, 2003
© Paul Turounet

Paul Turounet long term project “Estamos Buscando A – We’re Looking For” explores the cultural and emotional concerns of Mexican emigrants that are trying to cross the United States border. It is a really engaged and personal body of work, as Paul Turounet says: “like the migrants, I too, have been on a personal journey to a place where I’ll be in a place I can call home“.

In this article Paul Torounet show us a page from his journal that describe his experience in the middle of the desert, a long mail from a U.S. Border Patrol Agent and a description of his photographic installation Más allá – the Retablos of Migrants along the U.S. – Mexico Border

Following text and photos by Paul Turounet.

Estamos Buscando A – We’re Looking For

“Pobre Mexico! Tan lejos de Dios y tan cerca de los Estados Unidos.”
“Poor Mexico! So far from God and so close to the United States.”

Mexican President Porfirio Diaz (1877 – 1910)

Retablo Nº30 – Rene from Chihuahua, Rio Bravo, Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua, Mexico, 2004
© Paul Turounet

Since 1992, the U.S. Border Patrol has apprehended nearly 1.5 million undocumented persons attempting to enter the southern border from Mexico each year. During this time, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security has dramatically increased its law enforcement presence along the nearly 2,000 mile border. It’s hard to imagine anyone could make it past such a formidable barrier. Yet, Mexican and Central American migrants endure the journey and miraculously make it across despite the risks and dangers.

So why would so many men, women and children attempt to risk and sacrifice so much to come to the United States? To unite with family already there? Economic desperation and necessity? A restless spirit and the need to find emotional harmony? There is no universal reason other than the need to go from one place to another both literally and metaphorically; a need universal to existence and the human experience.

Retablo Nº2 – Martin from Sinaloa, Alejandro from Nayarit and Jose from Chihuahua, Tijuana, Baja California Norte, 2003
© Paul Turounet

With the support of a Fulbright Fellowship and grants from the Trans-Border Institute, I’ve been photographing the social and cultural conditions of the Mexican experience on the U.S. – Mexico Border while living on both sides of the border. I’ve been drawn to the border light, which has served as a beacon of hope for those desiring to go North. And like the migrants, I too, have been on a personal journey to a place where I’ll be in a place I can call “home;” a place where I’ll be resolved with my own sense of identity, purpose and values as well as provide others the opportunity to contemplate our collective spiritual needs to get to that place we all desire.

Regardless of the demarcation lines of country and culture, we are all migrants in search of something profound and meaningful to our being. The bright border light forces a pause in this transitory experience for the migrant. At that very moment, their faces intimately reveal an unsettling and knowing sense that something is being lost and sacrificed in anticipation of something gained once nightfall finally arrives.

June 24, 2004 – Traveling with Grupos Beta (Mexican Border Patrol)

Retablo Nº17 – Joseline Torres from Leon, Puerto San Miguel, Sonora, Mexico, 2004
© Paul Turounet

It takes about an hour to drive south from Tucson to Sasabe. I’ve been staying in Tucson, as there’s only one hotel in Sasabe and it’s usually filled with migrants. It would be too dangerous to stay there anyway. Sasabe feels like the wild west only the guns aren’t visible.

Crossing the border, it takes a while to convince the Mexican Customs agent why I’m going to Sasabe. He’s right, there’s nothing there, “Just a bunch of Mexicans looking to escape.” After he goes through my gear, I make some pictures of the agent and put the Polaroid negatives in my jar of sodium thiosulfate. He was really curious about what the soup jar full of liquid was for.

For the past few days, I’ve been traveling with Grupos Beta, the Mexican Border Patrol for the Protection of Migrants. They don’t have any law enforcement jurisdiction and are not allowed to carry firearms – even though many of the human and drug smugglers are packing a full arsenal of weapons. There are four agents stationed at the Grupos Beta office in Sasabe and they can only travel along the border to advise migrants of the dangers of crossing and register minors who are attempting to cross.

Retablo Nº16 – La Ladrillera – “The Brickyard” – Human Smuggling Loading Area, Sasabe, Sonora, Mexico, 2004
© Paul Turounet

Since the motorcycle kept getting stuck in the sand, and I was slowing them down on their quad-runners, it’s decided we’ll travel by truck to Rancho La Sierrita, which is about 20 miles west of Sasabe. Before heading out, we stop at the Super Coyote Market to get some water and mix it with orange-flavored powder for a cheap version of orange juice.

Just south of town, we drive through La Ladrillera – “The Brickyard” – an old brick-making area that has been converted into a one-stop migrant transit center where nearly all the migrants come from Altar to make travel plans to cross the border. In the afternoon, once trucks are loaded full with migrants, they travel out it into the desert – both east and west – to drop migrants at isolated crossing points. Parked is a brand new, red Ford Lobo (F-150), which makes Felipe and Jaime, the Grupos Beta agents, nervous. “We don’t stop when the truck is here. Too dangerous.”

Arroyo de Coyote, Road between Sasabe and Rancho La Sierrita, Sonora, Mexico, 2004
© Paul Turounet

Along the way to Rancho La Sierrita, we stop at Arroyo de Coyote. It is the middle of the day and already hot. There’s no breeze – just the buzzing of flies everywhere. Everything is still in the desert. There are two large arroyos that have been created over time from the monsoon rains that take place every summer. Both are filled with clothes and other personal effects – pants, shirts, backpacks, underwear. Arroyo de Coyote is where migrants are robbed and the women are sexually assaulted.

Rancho La Sierrita is in the middle of nowhere, about a mile south of the border. It’s a place where migrants come to wait – wait to meet up with a coyote, wait for nightfall, wait to be smuggled across the barbed wire fence, wait for the unknown. There’s nothing here except a couple of little shacks where migrants can pick up supplies before making their journey north at nightfall.

Retablo Nº17 – Joseline Torres from Leon, Puerto San Miguel, Sonora, Mexico, 2004
© Paul Turounet

We stop at Puerto San Miguel, another small migrant camp, and pick up nine women and three children who had been abandoned by their coyote the night before. One of the women is six-months pregnant. They want to go back to La Ladrillera so they can find another coyote to take them across. As we travel east back to Sasabe, it seems we’re passing trucks with full loads heading west every fifteen minutes. How can so many people be crossing every day?

As we approach La Ladrillera, the red truck is still there. We stop at the edge of the brickyard and drop the women and children off. Felipe tries to persuade them to return to town, but they insist on trying to cross. The dangers and uncertainty of their journey and the possibility of making it across outweighs returning home.

Heading back to my cheap hotel room in Tucson, I think about what I’ve seen. Riding a motorcycle, especially through the desert, provides for quite a bit of time to be with one’s thoughts. My head feels like it’s going to explode in my helmet. It’s so hot.

August 10, 2004 – Email from U.S. Border Patrol Agent

Retablo Nº21 – Unidentified Migrant, La Carilla, Sonora, Mexico, 2004
© Paul Turounet

Dear Paul

Just a quick note to thank you again for helping out with the alien that you found on the side of Highway 286. I just wanted to let you know the resolution of what happened that day (to the best of our knowledge).

After you left, we had a flyover of the area west of 286 and north of the ranch at milepost 31 by the Arizona Army National Guard OH-58 that was supporting our operations. Usually they have at least a Borstar agent on board along with the 2 man crew. Approximately 8 agents from our shift and another 4 – 6 from the following shift worked the area that he had told us that the group was at. Basically, after interviewing the guy, we were able to match his footprints to a series of footprints that were running east – west and back again on one of the ranch roads about 3 – 5 miles from 286 approximately across from milepost 36 – 38. The alien was asked to step directly next to one of these tracks and they matched exactly in terms of size and pattern; so it was pretty conclusive that they were his sign. He had apparently gotten disoriented at some point that night and had backtracked at least twice trying to find his group. From that point, it is approximately 7 miles due north to highway 86 and even closer to a very popular load out spot at the southernmost end of Coleman road. From what we could figure from what he showed us; his group had been pretty close to one of the water tanks for the cattle near the eastern edge of the Baboquivari Kitt Peak area. (They couldn’t have gotten much water from the ones that I saw that day; and if they did drink it, they would have possibly gotten sick from the fecal contamination).

Francisco Martinez Espinosa from Tabasco being questioned by U.S. Border Patrol agents near Three Points, Arizona, United States, 2004
© Paul Turounet

I’ve gotten somewhat familiar with the area myself and if you hug the side of the mountains, it adds a bit of walking but by going straight, you will end up just a half mile or so from Coleman Road. Coleman is about a 2 1/2 mile long north south road so it is possible to miss it by walking parallel to it; but even if you did, you would eventually hit the 2 lane east west highway 86. Coleman is a big load out for aliens now; in the past MJ backpackers (marijuana smugglers) used it too but not too much lately. Either way, if the group got to Coleman or 86, they got picked up by someone…either smugglers, friendly folks or us. He didn’t recognize anyone at the station as belonging to his group; so my guess is that after he left to find water, the others left once they thought that he wasn’t coming back. Probably the entire time that he had been searching for water for them, they were moving to be picked up on the highway and might have already been in a drop house by that time.

In any event, fortunately, so far we haven’t made any discoveries of any group that size in the 1100 area west of 286 that had died from the heat. Since that day, neither BP nor aliens have reported any large numbers of dead out there in that area…if there had been reports, we would have heard of this, probably by now. Unfortunately, the agents in the Gila Bend area did find that group a few days ago with the five aliens that had died. In fact, it is averaging still about 1 a day throughout the sector. (You do remember how we talked that one of the reasons that there are so many aliens being found dead has as much to do with having more agents in helicopters, atvs, and horseback as it does with the heat and the number of aliens crossing…you don’t really know if some of them have been dead for 10 years but they are all counted in this year’s tally.

It is truly amazing everyday; today I caught a girl on her 16th birthday. Her group had left her just 1/2 mile or so in the US. I’m not sure what the reason was that they let her fall behind. She had a 1 gallon jug of water, a small bottle of pedialyte when the water were to run out, a plastic garbage bag for the monsoons (if they occurred), a change of clothes, a hat, some food, and the clothes on her back. With her inexperience and the distance she would have had to cover completely alone, there is no doubt in my mind whether she might have made it. She was on the other side of 286 right down near Sasabe. Basically on that side, there is only the Buenos Aires Reserve road system, Arivaca Road at milepost 12 and a ranch road about milepost 16. If she weren’t able to make either of those roads to be picked up, or if she stubbornly kept on going when she ran out of water, there isn’t anything till milepost 30 or so. The saddest thing was that after an interview with the Mexican consulate, she got back on the voluntary return bus to Nogales, Sonora…we couldn’t put her on the airplane to send her back to Chiapas since she was an unaccompanied minor and the current rules don’t allow us to do that, even though in my mind it would make a lot more sense to get them as fast as possible to their home. (Of course, there is probably a very good reason that she left home in the first place!). One common theme that most of these southern Mexicans have is that nobody wants them here and nobody wants them at home either.

Anyway, I appreciate your thoughtfulness and concern and the help you gave us that day. A lot of people wouldn’t have stopped. I hope that your projects are going well and that you get a chance to come out this way again sometime. I wanted to be sure that I was putting out what the best info that I could get about this situation.

Estamos Buscando A – We’re Looking For Installation

Having returned from teaching photography in Guadalajara, Mexico at the end of the summer in 2006, I was watching t.v. when a news story came on discussing the tearing down of the U.S. – Mexico Border Wall at Border State Park, between the San Ysidro, California and Tijuana, Baja California Norte. This is where the steel wall literally runs into the Pacific Ocean for approximately 100 yards, dividing only the flow of the water. I became interested in seeing what was going to happen to the pieces being dismantled and if I could get my hands on them.

I had recently completed a public art, site-specific installation entitled, Más allá – the Retablos of Migrants along the U.S. – Mexico Border, with some of the portraits I had been making. For the site-specific work, I printed some of the initial portraits from Tijuana on 1/4- inch, 16″ x 20″ steel plates and proceeded to rivet them to the border wall in Mexico where the migrant had been photographed. While the steel plates had been permanently riveted to the border, the photographic imagery eventually deteriorated as time passed due to the desert elements of the scorching sun. Only traces of the image remained, providing for a compelling contemplation of the temporal nature of memory and the passage of time.

As I had expanded the project to include other areas of the border, including the Sonora Desert and the Rio Grande region, I wanted to develop and produce an installation that would function as a reference to this initial site-specific sensibility. With the wall being dismantled, I figured there would be scrap pieces that I could use and decided to see what it would take to acquire them.

The next morning I drove down to Border State Park to see what was there and inquired to a U.S. Border Patrol agent as to who had jurisdiction for the dismantling project and scrap pieces. He pointed me in the direction of the U.S. Marine Corps unit that was responsible for the project. I waited for 45 minutes in the hot sun until they stopped working for the day. I approached the officer in charge of the operation and inquired about how I might be able to get some of the pieces as I explained I was an artist working on a photographic project on migrants. He had just returned from Iraq and I could tell he really wasn’t interested in being on the Border. “Fuck, take as much of this shit as you want! We’re here for one more day so if you want it, you need to come get it tomorrow. Doesn’t matter to me.” I’m just glad we’re leaving. I’d rather be back in Iraq than here.” The next day, I rented a moving truck and loaded up 61 pieces of the 4′ and 6′ steel planks that previously been used as temporary aircraft landing ramps during the Vietnam War.

Estamos Buscando A – We’re Looking For : Jose Guadalupe Navarro (Missing Person’s Poster), Three Points, Arizona, 2003
© Paul Turounet

I now have approximately 332′ linear feet of the steel border wall available to suit any type of installation space – enough to make a wall that could be nearly 60 feet long and 12 feet high. Rather than pieces of steel, the Polaroid negatives of each migrant were digitally printed with a warm tone on 16” x 20” aluminum plates that are attached to the salvaged wall pieces, suggesting the essence of the desert landscape, history and memory as well as touching upon such references as 19th-century photographic tintypes, the Mexican religious iconography of the retablo as well as the previous site-specific works.

Global Summer Polaroid Series, Yiorgos Kordakis

Yiorgos Kordakis — Thu, 21 May 2009 08:21:30 +0000

Yiorgos Kordakis, a Greek photographer who was one of my favorite discoveries in Arco Madrid, contributes to Camera Obscura with an article about his series of large format Polaroid Global Summer. He explains why he is fascinated by sea and summer holidays, and why he wants to compare the differences between places and states. How people enjoy the summer in USA, in Romania and India? Yiorgos Kordakis also explain that he is not interested in shooting in a journalistic style, but he prefers to be distant from the subject. The results are his wonderful photographs with tiny and blurred people under the infinite sky, all different or all the same?

Following text and images by Yiorgos Kordakis.

I was born and raised in Greece, a country surrounded by the sea, the reason why my relation with water soon became a very intimate one. You see, we Greeks tend to consider our country as the best possible destination for one’s summer holidays, so we usually choose not to travel abroad while the summer lasts. Relatively, one could easily say that there is an unbreakable bond among the people of Greece, the Mediterranean Sea and the Greek beautiful islands. Having this notion in mind, I came up with the idea of this project, curious to learn how the people of other countries around the globe spend their own summertime; this project tends to record the different ways people all over the world enjoy their summer and the sea. Nevertheless, my interest hasn’t been on shooting this project through a reporter’s view. I liked more the idea of thinking my self as a far observer and I deliberately kept a distance from the scenery I was shooting at times.

My whole perspective was based on the vision I have when imagining the earth, and everything it holds on it, as being photographed from high above the sky. If this vision could be actually depicted on a film we would then realize the charisma that water has, that is to function as a bewitching huge blue magnet that attracts all of us humans.

Just imagine that globally, everyday, millions of people fly, drive or walk to reach exotic destinations, beaches, pools, rivers or parks just to be closer to water. Maybe that could be scientifically explained by the fact that we spend the first 9 months of our creation swimming in some other water, the “liquid of life”…

So, my whole photographic perception came from this vision of mine, that we could see ourselves from the sky, on a global scale.

At this point I must admit that, besides the fact that I really love technology, I don’t like the digital turn that Photography has taken over the last years. Nevertheless, I do shoot digital when I work for commercial reasons but I am not yet ready to move into that area for my personal projects. Therefore, for this present project I used an Arca Swiss 4×5 camera which made the whole process very difficult, basically because of the usually high temperature of summer locations, plus the existence of a lot of sand in the same areas, which is always a problem.

I decided to use Polaroids instead of conventional films for several different reasons, before Polaroid’s announcement regarding the discontinuance of its Films Production. When I first heard the news I was so shocked that I rushed into purchasing as many films as I could. Today, I just enjoy the fact that “Global Summer” might be the last Project done with Polaroids, and to me this could sound even as slightly romantic… as being the remnant of an era!

There were two things I was seeking for my shots: Interesting, photographically speaking, locations and a “good contrast of summer”. Finally, I felt astonished when I realized the different ways people enjoy summer, something I had never thought of up to the moment I decided to do this project, to study and get prepared for my trips. On #18 for example, you can see people having fun on an artificial beach and the fake wave. This is a shot taken in USA. These people, mainly tourists, have travelled from all over the world to visit this place, but I can’t imagine my self or any other Greek enjoying an artificial beach. On the other hand, in #8 which was taken in India, I saw people getting into water with their clothes on, because of their culture, while on the beach there were all kind of animals wondering around, among people. You can actually see a white cow among them in this shot. Once again, I fail to imagine such a scene in any western country. I also realized that Indians go the beach to interact socially, and they remain there long after the sunset, when another party begins, with food served, lights and music on. In #36 which was shot in Budapest, where people don’t have access to the sea and lakes are a few miles away, people chose to enjoy the sun on public pools. These pools are actually natural mineral springs, busy even when it snows, but it is so interesting that such landscapes can be found only in one, unique part of the world. It adds so much to that “global” contrast I was seeking. I also visited Beirut, which is surrounded by the sea, but instead of long crowed beaches, I found numerous pools, both private and public, most of them being right next to the sea. It seems that Lebanese prefer these pools more than the sea, where they definitely enjoy themselves. I haven’t yet found another place with so many pools, especially when the sea is so close and easily accessible.

#4 is another interesting place I visited during my journey. It’s a famous beach on the island of Zakinthos, in Greece. This is a completely remote place, the only access to it being by the sea. I had to visit the island three times before I managed to take this shot. People go there by boats of different kinds and sizes, but when the sea is even slightly rough, small boats can’t approach it. I wanted to shoot this photo with the beach full of people, and I was very unlucky with my first two attempts. There, the temperature usually rises above 40C and there is nowhere to hide. I was afraid that my camera would “melt”. In any case, it was always interesting and funny the way people reacted before a huge camera in the middle of a beach. Americans seemed more relaxed as they have a great photographic culture and they are accustomed to these things, Greeks were confusing it with a video camera and were asking questions like “which TV channel are you from?”, Indians used to gather around me and look at me like if I were from Mars! It has all been part of the priceless experience one gets in such cases and it was always nice to chat with people, even though I felt like replying to the same questions at such a point that I felt like I was needlessly repeating my self over and over again! I finally chose these certain photos out of the whole project because they represent both the global and the contrast I was looking for. I would love to go on shooting endlessly more and more locations and places around the world, but unfortunately I had to accept that this the end of an era.