Dreaming

I've always liked this photograph of Stephanie. Only a photographer would proudly display a framed photograph of a former spouse nearly forty years later. She was my wife back in 1968 when I made the photograph. We had two kids, a girl and a boy, and then divorced about a decade later. Back then I was going through one of my experimental stages in my photography, trying various techniques and different cameras, even a huge 8x10 view camera on a massive tripod. I was doing a lot of double exposures both in the camera and in the darkroom. Most of the in camera double exposures were made with a Minolta Autocord on 120 film. The Autocord had a button making recocking the shutter for the second (or third!) exposure easy to do.

This photograph was a darkroom creation. It wasn't done in the camera. This is a print made using two angles and magnifications of the same image on one sheet of paper. The original negative was probably made on Kodak High Contrast Copy Film using dilute developer to try to retain some tonality while still giving a stark high contrast effect. Stephanie was lying on the grass in our back yard, positioned so it looks like the sun is illuminating her from below. I'm not really sure what camera and lens I was using, but it was probably my old black 85mm f/2 Nikkor on my brand new Leica M4.

P.S. Want an archival quality print of this or one of my other photos? E-mail me at preacherpop42@aol.com for details.