Sunday, January 07, 2007




The true snapshot has disappeared from most photographers' grasp. When box cameras and 620 roll film ruled the world (the little Leica's were tiny "gadgets" that snapped at the heals of the lumbering box cameras) friends would tell you, "I hope they come out," or "Good luck." Snapshots were photographs that "turned out" when most of them didn't. We appreciated snapshots because we were lucky to get them, to have them. Can a digital camera take snapshots? Can an image that is captured (to parlay the modern lingo) be a snapshot when we can see it instantly and we can delete it and or re-take it?

I have wanted to photograph my grandaughters in the controlled lighting environment of my studio for almost a year. The problem was trying to find a friendly makeup artist to do the honours since my eldest daughter was playing vague and uncommitted. A couple of makeup artists I know either had a too busy schedule or were burned out. Finally my wife lured my Ale in a "if we do this for your you will do this for us" exchange. That was yesterday.

We had several dresses for Lauren (4) but besides Rebecca's former sailor dress and Lauren's wine coloured Christmas dress that was the end of it. She refused to cooperate. Rebecca at 9 was even more difficult. She stamped her feet, looked at my camera cross-eyed and threatened to cry which would have run all of Ale's expertly applied mascara.

Here are some of the results. The colour picture is a scanned Polaroid, of Rebecca in her Halloween costume. It is the closest I have ever gotten to "chimping".



To chimp is to look at the LCD image in the back of digital camera and where you make that instant decision (or not) to scramble a real live person's photons into a region beyond William Gibson's cyberspace. Perhaps they go to that hallowed place were all the snapshots we ever took, that never turned out, still exist as latent images that could have been.