Written and Photographed by Patten Smith

Background

I came of age photographically before digital cameras were even dreamt of, and, although I own some pricey digital gear, film remains my preferred medium for reasons that are verging on the philosophical! The crystalline structure of film-grain roots the meaning of the image in the mineral, in the stardust from which humanity emerged, and this ties in with my very naturalistic, non-Platonic, views of reality.

Tower Bridge Amalgam

The Tower Bridge amalgam is the most successful of a series of photos I have shot recently that attempt to disconcert the viewer and to question uninterrogated convictions about reality. Our old certainties are being eroded in the face of climate change, destructive populisms with associated reality-averse propaganda, and now Gaia’s revenge, Covid19. With this in mind, I hope, in various ways, to inject a sense of the uncanny into the familiar in my photographs. Some years ago I borrowed the image-within-an-image approach used by Kenneth Josephson, but more recently have moved to experimenting with infrared film and using various techniques for combining different images of the same subject, both in-camera and under the enlarger.

Gear and Process

I work near a number of London landmarks and felt that a cliched tourist image might be ripe for such an injection of the uncanny, and this is why I went to Tower Bridge. Although I had been mostly trying out image combination in-camera with a Nikon, on the day I photographed the bridge I was carrying a Leica M6 which does not support multiple exposures. So instead I simply took 3 photos from a standard tourist vantage point, one straight shot, followed by two more shots tilting the camera in opposite directions. I used metered exposures with HP5 pushed one stop (can’t remember exactly but probably around f11 at 1/125th second), and developed in Microphen. Under the enlarger, I didn’t try sandwiching negatives together as they were all of normal density and this would have proved very hard to print. Instead, I determined the time required under the enlarger with a test strip and then printed each negative for a third of that time on a single sheet of multigrade paper. After a few attempts, I decided to give a slight dominance to the untilted view by increasing its relative exposure from 33% to around 40% of the total. Very little dodging or burning.

I’m now looking to explore more ways of injecting the uncanny into everyday images, but will clearly have to rethink subject matter as we are just entering a covid19 lockdown!

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