Len's Lens
I REALLY must get my negative scanner up and running. Following on from last week’s room tidying – still not finished.
I’ve spent the past hour and a half craning my neck as I hold up early 1990s Glastonbury festival negs to the bedroom light. Great fun, brings back wonderful memories but boy my neck is killing me.
The older ones of you will remember back in the 90s we shot black and white Tri-X or T-Max 400 asa, 36 exposure film.
After processing the films, we edited the negs with the aid of a lupe. If we liked what we saw we would identify our favourites by snipping the edge of the film with a pair of scissors. These frames would eventually be used in the that week’s paper. Colour photographs were not used in the Western Gazette until around 1994. Very strange times indeed, I remember being told not include too many bright primary colours when composing photographs as the press at the time couldn’t handle them.
A lot of people in those days appeared in our paper looking as though they were severely sunburned, when in fact the press used to overcompensate with the amount of red ink being used in the printing process. Just a few years on and we hardly ever publish black and white pictures, except for the Your Weekend pages. Singers and artists often send in mono images to accompany their press releases as they believe it’s more in keeping with their image. I think it is more to do with vanity, most people look better in black and white, especially me as my Twitter and Instagram profile pictures prove.
The snipping process of negatives was the quickest way to edit photographs unlike the digital age when you can see every frame. Many unclipped negatives are left having never been printed. I must have thousands of pictures that I have taken but never seen except in negative form.
I love those TV shows when they show out-takes and previously unseen clips of the stars of the programme. This is exactly how I feel about my unused negatives. It’s a crying shame, pictures are surely taken to be seen, enjoyed and these days this is all the easier with all the social media platforms to hand.
I came across a negative of one of my favourite singers PJ Harvey, taken in Dorset when she was just a shy teenager.
But back in the mid 90s I was photographing her and her family because an escaped convict had been captured outside their home in Corscombe. I remember taking a picture of a skinny girl with black hair and leg warmers wrapped around her mother as they sat in the garden.
We were talking about music, and she remarked that she was off to London that weekend to sign a recording contract. The next time I photographed this girl was when she stepped onto the Pyramid stage at Glastonbury Festival in a bright pink catsuit. She was magnificent and a far cry from that coy young girl wrapped around her mother.
I have seen her many times in concert as a fan, I have bought every CD she has released. But I would love the opportunity to photograph her again, just once more, maybe in her garden with a cup of coffee and no escaped convicts this time.
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