High Quality Low Fidelity:
…from the Brownie Nudes Series…
High-Quality Low-Fidelity: I’m not sure exactly how I came up with this term. It just popped into my head as I was trying to come up with ways to create interesting images with a pictorialist tradition. For the Brownie Nudes series, I have deliberately chosen to push high speed film in a way that would encourage grain, and I deliberately chose a camera…a Brownie Hawkeye… actually two of them… which are point-and-shoot cameras from the 1950’s that have almost no controls over the exposure and absolutely no control over the focus of the images.
The ways I chose to manipulate the elements of the image were instead accomplished by playing with film speed and processing. I chose lighting that would allow the exposure I wanted within the limits of the film and the camera, which only has one shutter speed, and its feasibility for producing an acceptable image.
The Virtues of Bad Lighting:
This image is from a series of test Images done with an anatomically-correct doll. This is not a real person. It was photographed on high-speed film with a Nikon F and a macro lens by lamp light.
The Virtues of Bad Lighting is a term I have come up with for a concept that I am still exploring. I think it may be better referred to as “The Virtues of Bad Technique” …or… “The Virtues of Technical Flaws or problems”
I have decided that for all of the time I have spent learning proper and “good” ways to produce images in the editorial world, I have to spend just as much time now unlearning those techniques in order to produce interesting images again in my art practice. While “happy accidents” do of course occur in my work, I would much rather transform those accidents into repeatable techniques for my tool kit, instead of developing a superstitious reliance on serendipity. This will likely be a lifelong practice.
The picture above is from a series that I am still working on in the background. It’s a series of portraits and studies of anatomically-correct dolls. At first, I was sort of hesitant to do this at all, but it turns out that working with these dolls has actually opened up creativity in my mind that has lead to other collections of images which don’t involve the dolls at all. It could be that the doll project will develop into work with its own merits at some point, or it may never surface as mature work for me. Time will tell. For now, the dolls will fill my journal in small machine prints amid hastily scrawled notes scribbled with an ink pen.