Photographer’s worst nightmares…
1. Fire
2. Water
We’ve all heard the horror stories and likely know someone who has had one of those portfolio disasters, the one’s that make photographers cringe. It’s a phenomenon shared by the digital era and the film era, with digital having its own file-losing nightmares. But when we talk of the era of film the product is much more tangible.
I know of many photographers’ archives (many personal associates) taken down by fire. Stories of wedding photographers reshooting the event at their own cost, press photographers losing every negative they’ve ever shot, commercial photographers fronting the budget for a Palm Beach hotel shoot, all to save face and recover from a horrific disaster.
Water…water damage to a photographer’s portfolio is different. The prints and negatives are not obliterated, but left in some state very similar to their undamaged selves. We can thank the process of negative and print making to the absorbency of these relics of photography, because preservation is possible.
Our story is not one of an entire portfolio drowned (or any of our work within the last 5 years, those are securely dry!) but a snapshot of our lives, the emergence of our artistic career and our first few years doing what we do together.
Join us on a Friday morning…
We had a hint of something being amiss in the neighborhood when the one of the other businesses had three hoses pumping water out onto Main Street, the feeling wasn’t a good one and when Shannon turned on the basement light reality set in.
One and a half feet of fresh rain water waited for us at the bottom of the steps. Cardboard boxes and packing materials waded around below us and we both ran down the stairs, immediately going for the area we stored what few images and art were down there. A few pieces of framed prints aside, everything was off the floor and it was a matter of getting those up the stairs to safety, undamaged.
Then we noticed the blue chest immersed, actually floating. This chest has been neatly packed and repacked from the time we started shooting together 10 years ago until we settled back down in Cedar Falls, probably 6 years of our lives. This case has traveled from Iowa to New Hampshire and back again and not once has it been damaged, granted it’s 100 pounds and at maximum capacity, but we cared for that case and took that case everywhere we moved.
We’re talking photography school assignments, personal moments, travel adventures, our wedding, the first assignments we were paid for – all of it water-logged. The piles of soggy negatives, prints, transparencies and polaroids were overwhelming but the option was clear, save them all.
Going back to the properties of old-school photography, a negative or print was made to be wet – that’s how they came to be in the first place. Whereas a DVD or harddrive are all about being dry. So, if you can separate negs and prints from one another before they dry the damage is minimal, sometimes nil. And so, a day began of covering every available surface in the studio with a portion of our life.
When it was all said and done the portfolio of two emerging photographic artists is revealed, the personal moments, the artistic visions and the commercial assignments. It’s a daunting realization to see such a significant part of your existence, a stepping stone to your current place in the world laid out in a 16×90 foot space.
And what do we see?
An artistic vision that covers events and situations very personal to us, those that we could deal with only through the filtered reality of a camera lens and memories, so many memories.
One section of the river of prints contains our wedding beside a “Radioactive” sign I shot for one of my first digital composites and some falls Shannon shot near Breckenridge. Another section has the Teeter-Totter-A-Thon we shot one weekend next to photograms, copywork and our adventures as “young” traveling photographers.
Scattered throughout archives, random stock images from our adventures on the East Coast appear. The Revolutionary War forts, hidden tourist traps, days on the beach or in the woods. The Meow Mix truck we saw in a parking lot in Portsmouth, the guitar player downtown Boston, the rusted truck in Berwick that was turned into a year-round Halloween display with two skeletons, a whale watching excursion on the Atlantic, St. Patrick’s Day in South Boston.
Family is a constant subject of this time. Shannon’s mother and father, two beacons of our life who we miss so much, come to life before our eyes. My nieces and nephews, that great shot I have of Cole when he was only 4 and the last Williams family picture we took remind me of what I’m missing at home. There’s the last portrait of my dear cat Autumn, pictures of Brandon and Ashtin that only Shannon could get and the last few shots I have of Grandma and Grandpa.
The eyes we see behind the lens are those that took extra steps to get the shot we wanted, training for what we do today. Shots Shannon took after climbing 20 feet up a bridge, shots we’ve laid in the mud or in the middle of a busy street for, shots we’ve waited hours for, even the shots that we got because we were willing to make fools of ourselves for.
Final Thoughts
There were so many images, too many to count, too many we forgot about…Just a body of work laid out on the floor. Almost all dried fine, nothing that a little digital magic couldn’t fix if needed, so we certainly are lucky. It could have been worse but the emotional impact of seeing that many images that meant so much to us in anything but the pristine condition we’ve ensured for them over the years is heart wrenching.
And so, we from here we finish cleaning up, repack everything and begin again. We have gained a rejuvenated spirit for photography and the art we love to create. Seeing all of those images brought back a sense of purpose, a renewed passion and a desire to go further, go bigger.
