Back To My Real Rootz ~ Black & White!

photo (c)2008 Mario Flores


I was carrying my Bessa with the 15mm lens as usual when I got into a conversation with a guy, Mario Flores, carrying a Nikon DSLR. He said that he'd recently opened a gallery here in North Miami, that he too was a photographer, and that he was exhibiting photography along with other media. He invited me to stop by and show him some of my work, which I did a few days later.

I showed him a bunch of prints from the 1960's and 70's, a few more recent things like my self portraits with the 15mm lens, and a few of my current project which results in some very absract images.

I get the effect by not developing the prints in a tray. I splatter Dektol developer on the exposed paper, sometimes leaving the drops in place for well over 5 minutes, then tilting the paper this way and that to sort of control where the drops wander across the paper. The long development under the drops causes bromiding, which results in grey streaks as well as streaks of normal developed image. The grey streaks continue out over the white borders outside the image. A few of the photos also have hand prints, where I've pressed my hands directly on the paper for a few minutes after soaking them with Dektol. Fortunately I'm not allergic to the metol in the Dektol. Some people can really get a bad rash.

The artists that were exhibiting and their friends loved those prints, but by and large the photographers who saw them wondered why I had the guts to screw up a print so badly, and then have the audacity to hang it in a gallery...LOL. I did sell another 11X14 of my Janis Joplin photo and one of the abstracts in the days before the show opened. Saturday I'll stop by the gallery and see what's going on there.

http://www.rootzgallery.com/