Leica R8, 60 mm f/2.8 Macro-Elmarit, Ilford Delta 400 Professional, Kodak D76.
David Bruce Jones (1942–2024) /
I made this portrait of my father in my parents’ home in Gaborone, Botswana, in late 2010. He was 68 at the time. I re-discovered the photograph soon after I began the long-overdue process of reviewing the 15-year archive of my negatives. The white balance was impossible to correct as the portrait was made indoors under a mixture of incandescent and fluorescent lighting using film that was designed for daylight. Even though the colours are irredeemably unnatural, I am very pleased with how the picture turned out—and to have found it at all.
I have added this photograph to a series called Candid, which is published as a gallery on this website. The collection contains colour shots of my family, friends, and acquaintances. You may also be interested in my black-and-white portraits.
A Sequence /
As the archive of my negatives has grown to hundreds of rolls spanning fifteen years of shooting film, it has become increasingly difficult for me to organize and make sense of my body of work. The six photographs presented above were taken in late 2010 using two cameras across three rolls of film. When I look at them now, thirteen years later, it’s clear that the younger me was trying to do something with these images. It is now left to the older me to discover what that might have been.
A sequence of photographs conveys a meaning that transcends what a single image can say in isolation; and a different sequence of the same photographs conveys a different meaning. The photographs in a sequence may be linked inter alia by subject, colour, style, composition, or time. The connections between them may be blatantly obvious or deftly subtle, logical or intuitive. Regardless, a sequence is order, and order is semantics—though the semantics may lie beyond expression in language.
Of course, the sequence I present here was imposed well after any of the photographs were taken, which entails that I couldn’t have meant then what I mean now. However, I couldn't have created this sequence now had I not then had the discipline to shoot thematically in a consistent style. This is what I mean when I say that I was trying to do something with these photographs: I had a definite idea of what I was trying to capture (in each single photograph) and I went about it doggedly, even in the face of many failures. I would be giving the younger me too much credit by saying that he was consciously and explicitly laying the foundation for a future book or exhibition of these photographs, but I do not think that it is an abuse of the truth to suggest that he may have anticipated a showing intuitively and that he may have subconsciously sought out subtle resonances between these frames, even across weeks and rolls of film.
I keep taking the same photograph, over and over again /
Anaheim and Vancouver, August and December 2010. Both photographs made with my favourite camera, the Nikon FM2N.
The Efflorescent Elegance of Exceptional Women /
Those who have paid even cursory attention to the vocabulary of the high fashion magazines realize that English has different meanings in this specialized context from those of normal usage. For example, the word "simple" or the phrase "simple little" is generally used to denote matters that would elsewhere be cited as examples of Byzantine complexity and indirection.
The best fashion photography has often indulged a similar taste for make-believe, and harmless (or almost harmless) mendacity. Irving Penn's simple little picture of a beautiful model in a fancy dress is a masterpiece of the genre.
Superficially the picture pretends to a directness and austerity that suggest the nineteenth-century studio portrait: It is devoid of luxurious textures, stage lighting, elegant properties, or an identifiable social ambience. What remains is an almost primitively simple record of a very elegant lady.
The simplicity is of course a sham. Perhaps the essential nature of this picture can be more clearly seen if one covers with a sheet of paper the model's beautiful (and seemingly tiny) head. It is possible that only a modern viewer would be able to identify what remains as representing a woman's body, rather than the silhouette of an orchid, or a scarified tribal priestess in ceremonial headdress, or the rhizome of an iris. As a description of a dress the photograph is even more ambiguous; surely only one with prior knowledge of the fashions of 1950 could reconstruct a reasonable pattern of the dress from the information given by the picture.
The true subject of the photograph is the sinuous, vermicular, richly subtle line that describes the silhouetted shape. The line has little to do with women's bodies or real dresses, but rather with an ideal of efflorescent elegance to which certain exceptional women and their couturiers once aspired.
— John Szarkowski (1925-2007) in Looking at Photographs (1973)
Woman in Black Dress (1950, 16 1/4 x 11) by Irving Penn (American, 1917-2009)