Notes on the Car Series

Goals

I had several photographic goals in mind;

I wanted to break out of the traditional "still image." Somehow, I wanted to capture more time than the traditional instant a still picture captures. That's when time exposures started to interest me, for they could convey change over time, in some sense representing an expanded present moment.

Another photographic goal was to find a way to add more fluidity to photographic images. After my years of photojournalism, where the images had to be as sharp as possible, I wanted to find some way of capturing an image that took more viewer involvement to "recognize." The instantaneous act of image recognition is a bit of a mystery, having been assigned to the unconscious in the early years of development. As an example, the Car Series photographs taken inside the car show a "shadow" of a driver that takes a bit of looking to pick out. In fact, since the driver's body blocks the light, it's more like a subtraction of the driver from the image.

I've always been puzzled by my predicament, as I'm sure you are by your own. How does self happen? How does it unhappen? I appear in these photos, but mostly as a fog or as the subtraction of myself. I obscured the image of self, because that's the fact of the matter.

The concept "automobile" is so deeply ingrained in our daily consciousness that we've really lost all possibility of having a real perspective on it. In that sense it has become rather like the concept, "self." If you doubt this, remember the last time your car broke down and your mental state at the time. So that's why the car features prominently in these photos.

There was also a pure desire to experiment. The nature of the time exposure/motion technique meant that I would not really know what had been recorded on the film until it was developed. I knew what the setup would record, but had no idea what conditions would be recorded on my particular trip through the city. The words "Howard Johnsons's," visible in one of the photos, were imaged fortuitously at a stoplight.

Methods

The photographs were taken with an old Speed Graphic, fitted with a 90mm SchneiderAngulon lens. This is a slightly wider-angle lens than 28mm is in the 35mm format. The film was 4X5 Tri-X Pan sheet film shot in standard two shot film holders. It was developed in D-76, followed by a 4-minute water bath at five degrees above the developer temperature. This is a way to extend development in the shadow areas and lower overall contrast.

In some photographs the camera was clamped to various areas in the car, the shutter opened, and then the car was driven around the city at night. Since the camera moved with the car during bumps and vibrations, the image of the car remained very sharp. The areas outside the car were "painted" by the lights of stores, streetlights, and signs. The ambient light in the car accumulated over the time of driving. Exposure times varied between 5 and 15 minutes, depending on traffic and a guestimate of the brightness of the lit areas I had driven through.