The Alabaster Lady

For the past two weeks, I’ve been working with ‘White On White’ images on pushed film.  The subject I’ve chosen for this is the memorial sculpture at the Botanical Gardens.  Although I love photographing gravestones, she wasn’t something I find myself attracted to.  Photographing her made me come to a better understanding of why I love photographer funerary structures.  The flaws with the sculpture as a work of art are blaringly clear to me because the alabaster is kept so pristinely.  Maybe it’s an actual likeness, maybe it misses the mark.  Whatever the case, there’s something wrong with how her face has been crafted and some of the details of her feet and ands really don’t work.  She has a great ass, so I focused on it.  Her back is wonderful.  The glass structure had a lot of lessons to give on the possibilities for: capturing layers of reflection, using reflection to create illusions, casting shadows within a small contained space.

Some of the darkroom prints are the best in this series.  I’ve been learning a lot about scanning 35mm color negatives.  The result of this is that it feels awkward when I look at these and I feel confused and insecure.  I almost wanted to go back to scanning poorly because before Joe taught me how to make scanner adjustments, the images I scanned looked okay to me.  Now they look a bit funny to my eye although they are much more accurate after slight manipulations in Camera Raw and Photoshop.  Before Joe taught me, when I’d scan, I wouldn’t be getting as much of the information as was available in the negative.  Depending on what I then did with that image, that was perfectly fine.  Where it became an issue is in the high and low key lighting I prefer to work with.