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Matinee: 'Hanging the California Train Stations Exhibit'
13 July 2024
Saturday matinees long ago let us escape from the ordinary world to the island of the Swiss Family Robinson or the mutinous decks of the Bounty. Why not, we thought, escape the usual fare here with Saturday matinees of our favorite photography films?
So we're pleased to present the 561st in our series of Saturday matinees today: Hanging the California Train Stations Exhibit.
This 47 second video shows three OGs* hanging an exhibit at Stephen Johnson Photography on July 5. You've never seen OGs move so fast.
They didn't actually move that fast, of course (we feel somehow obliged to point out for VYGs*). The magic of time-lapse photography makes it look as if they did.
Shapiro explains how he turned from a microscope to photography:
When I was 12, looking through a microscope fascinated me, I wanted to photograph what I was seeing and decided I needed to learn how to take pictures. It turned out photography fascinated me more than looking through the microscope. While photography was my passion, medicine became my profession.
In 1979 I moved back to the Bay Area determined to become a West Coast large format landscape photographer. By attending one of the last Ansel Adams workshops in Yosemite, I met Todd Walker who was in the forefront of the renaissance of the alternative processes. He inspired me to explore these non-silver techniques. I experimented in cyanotypes, brownprints and gum but when I found bromoil and especially bromoil transfer I knew that I had found my medium.
Bromoil? Alternative Photograpy explains the process, which plays off water's ability to repel oil, just as it does in offset printing.
First the silver print is bleached and the gelatin tanned before the print is fixed, washed and dried. Then the print is soaked in lukewarm water to swell the gelatin. A brush or brayer is then used to apply an oily ink to the print. The tanned gelatin, which is the darker areas of the print, didn't absorb the water and won't repel the ink. Where there was less tanned gelatin, some water was absorbed and so the ink is somewhat repelled.
You can work on several layers of ink using different stiffness and work on just parts of the print to build up the image in stages.
Shapiro spills the details his approach, which works well with digital images, on his Web site.
The exhibit they are hanging are Shapiro's wide-angle images of California Train Stations. And they're doing it faster than a speeding train, as the saying goes.
Having just read Jim Lehrer's Flying Crows which is set in Kansas City's Union Station, we enjoyed seeing an echo of that past elegance in California.