Longing For The Eclipse

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vimeo Direkt nolink

1962.

I went to Florence to see and shoot the total eclipse of the sun
It was sudenly cold
And a silence different from all other silences
The light on the land different from all other lights
And then darkness
Total stillness
All I could think  was
That during an eclipse
Feelings cease to exist too
Antonini shot these images without really knowing why
Obsessing over a strange premonition
And he will not use them
Because he doesn’t like explicit definitions
They belong to the most intimate memories of an artist
Who never ceases to explore the unknown

I came across Aether a few weeks back and gave it a listen.  Never thinking of it again until Sunday after fashion district adventures.  And in the usual manner of random order, the chaotic nature in which my decisions seem lacking foresight I was drawn back to the album.  Milla Ann came on and in the same random manner I was struck by its rhythm.  There was something in it that needed further looking into…so out came the browser and a video search.  What turned up was a short snippet from Antonioni’s L’Avventura, which I’ve never seen, though I am familiar with his work.

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So what of it? Well, nothing really other than a perfectly timed moment of synchronicity.  I’ve begun a ten week mentorship with Ken Merfeld yesterday and have to come up with 10-12 pieces by mid-December with some semblance of continuity and hopefully a new spectrum of my photographic vision.  I have white in mind.  He tells me I’m up for a challenge.  I still want white.  I’m working with longing at the moment and like the idea of reflections on longing for the eclipse.  Wouldn’t that be nice?  Can you see it?  For an added layer of difficulty these have to be portraits. It could never be that easy…so my subjects will be my suns, dressed in white, some sort of white, some incarnation of white…and now I just have to find their moons….

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I’m in good hands, however.  Ken is an accomplished photographer who has taken a step away from commercial photography for the most part and regressed to an almost extinct method of capturing images.  He does portraits using the colllodion method pioneered by Julia Margaret Cameron as early as 1870s. This process is absolutely staggering to me:

• Clean the glass plate (extremely well)
• Flow the glass plate with “salted” (iodide/bromide) Collodion
• Immerse the plate in a silver nitrate bath (for 3-5 minutes)
• Expose the plate (can range from less than a second to several minutes)
• Develop the plate (using an ferrous sulfate based developer)
• Fix the plate (with potassium cyanide or sodium thiosulfate)

It’s time-consuming and lethal, but Ken’s studio where we will meet weekly is everything but.  He also lives there and created an environment that is as intriguing as his portraits.  Every nook and cranny makes no sense, but it does.  It is at once an attic, a library, a living room, and a secret garden (the place used to be a nursery). It has toys and cats, and fishes that bite your fingers, but is most importantly a photographic playground.  Ken even brought in bowling alley flooring as it is the most enduring, back-friendly surface to stomp on as you shoot for hours at a time.  There is much order in his chaos, and he’s a man after my own heart.