Argosy III - Deborah Kac
Stop No. 7Location: Los Angeles, CaliforniaPhotographer: Deborah KacDate: July 2006
About the Photographer:I
have been involved in photography on I was a teenager in the 1960s. In
August of 2004, a family tragedy catapulted me back into a serious
relationship with photography, after a hiatus of about fourteen
years. The perfect combination of the technical and the artistic
that photography affords somehow helped me to cope and offered some
relief during a very difficult time.
Two things that
have always fascinated me are time and place, and I find many mundane
locations and seemingly ordinary moments evocative and often poignant
in ways are hard for me to express verbally. So almost by default
I have become something of a time-and-place photographer, striving to
imbue the moments and places that I capture on film with some of the
feelings that they evoke in me. Of course, there is no way for me
to know if my photos are successful in evoking similar feelings in
others, but it is my hope that they are.
The Photographs:
For
the last twenty-six years I have lived in Los Angeles and I have found
it to be a most photogenic city. My time with the Argus C-4 coincided
with an amazing Southern California heat wave, one that has been going
on for more than three weeks, now. Unfortunately, blazing heat is
also accompanied here by blinding bright light -- leaving everything
with deep shadows and super hot highlights almost all day long.
Needless to say, this is not a dream come true for a photographer who
loves moody skies and open shade for taking pictures.
None-the-less, I greatly enjoyed working with this little gem of
a camera, and was very reluctant to let it go when my time was up.
There is definitely something unusually appealing in the C-4s design
and a number of people stopped to comment on it as I snapped away in
various places around the city. Sometime in the first few days
that I had the camera, I managed to lose its little makeshift lens cap,
so I bought it a new clip-on style cap at a local camera store.
Hopefully that will make it all the way to the end its journey.
I
shot two rolls for the Argosy 3 -- one on Polaroid “HighDefinition
plus” ISO 200 color print film (from a 99 Cent store) and one on Fugi
Neopan Acros ISO 100 black and white film. I found the camera
easy to work with, albeit a bit tricky to load, and in the bright, hot
summer sun, I wished that I had had at least one more shutter
speed. Still in all, the results were definitely more than
acceptable. I hope you enjoy these two photos, and that you feel
some of what I felt when I took them – that in this one particular
place a moment in a day, a life, or a decade is here and gone again in
the short time it takes to click a shutter.
All photographs this page © 2006 Deborah Kac
