Saturday, June 2, 2018

Things to do in June

Brilliant Things To Do in June


Plan for the summer months with our list of the best happenings to add to your calendar

Exhibitions and Events

Frida Kahlo: Making Her Self Up at the V&A, London: June 16, 2018The V&A’s exhibition of Frida Kahlo’s possessions is one of the year’s most eagerly awaited, and it finally opens this month. Including many of the Mexican artist’s personal artefacts that have never before been shown outside of her home country, which were discovered in 2004 at Kahlo’s Blue House, the exhibition will spotlight the clothes, jewellery, cosmetics and letters that she owned and used, offering an unprecedented glimpse into what her personal life might have looked like. An intimate, engaging exhibition that’s not to be missed.



Icons of Style: A Century of Fashion Photography, 1911-2011 at the Getty Center, Los Angeles: June 26 – October 21, 2018Spotlighting 100 years that span the 20th and early 21st centuries, the Getty Center’s survey of fashion photography looks to be a broad and compelling account of the medium’s recent history. The exhibition will be sizeable, counting over 150 photographs, which can be seen alongside garments by Alexander McQueen, Christian Dior and Halston, magazine covers and illustrations, and cover the most important figures in the industry, those who pioneered fashion photography as an art form and pushed boundaries in their practices. The selection of photography is nothing short of iconic, and fashion enthusiasts will no doubt marvel at this LA exhibition.



The Great Spectacle at the Royal Academy, London: June 12 – August 19, 20182018 marks the 250th anniversary of London’s Royal Academy, the city’s veritable hub of exciting historical and contemporary art. This year, then, is also the Academy’s 250th Summer Exhibition, and to honour the occasion it presents The Great Spectacle, a look back at the history of the annual groundbreaking exhibitions that bring together the best in British art of the time. How the show has evolved over the centuries and the way its impact has changed will be central to The Great Spectacle, which opens to coincide with this year’s Summer Exhibition – combining past and present in spectacular fashion.



Greg Gorman: Beyond the Portrait at 29 Arts in Progress, Milan: June 6 – September 1, 2018The roster of celebrities who have stepped in front of Greg Gorman’s lens is an impressive one, and includes the likes of Grace Jones, Leonardo DiCaprio, Michael Jackson, Marina Abramović and John Waters. The American photographer’s sensual black and white shots are being exhibited this summer in Milan (the opening of the exhibition is timed to coincide with the city’s Photo Week), each one an intimate, captivating portrayal of Gorman’s subject.



Michael Jackson: On the Wall at the National Portrait Gallery, London: June 28 – October 21, 2018Coinciding with what would have been the icon of music’s 60th birthday, London’s National Portrait Gallery is staging a monumental exhibition on Michael Jackson. On the Wall will hone in on how Jackson and his music inspired the artists, photographers, and fashion designers of the times via work by over 40 artists – think Andy Warhol, David LaChapelle and Catherine Opie – who depicted the musician in one way or another. The imprint that Jackson left on popular culture in his lifetime, and indeed continues to leave today after his death nine years ago, is undeniably compelling.





Jacques Henri Lartigue: C’est Chic! at Michael Hoppen Gallery and Paul Smith, Albemarle Street, London: until July 28, 2018“[D]espite the undeniable glamour, what he loved the most was to capture the spontaneous, the ordinary,” Paul Smith told AnOther of the inherent insouciance of Jacques Henri Lartigue’s photography, which is on show now in two London exhibitions curated by the designer and Michael Hoppen. Lartigue’s mesmerising photographs from the 1940s, 50s, 60s and 70s are, as the exhibition’s title suggests, incomparably chic, and what’s perhaps most exciting about this double offering of his oeuvre is the fact that many of the exhibited images have rarely been seen before now, since these later years of Lartigue’s career are much less studied. That, and the unbridled escapism they offer.   



Ron Arad: Yes to the Uncommon at the Vitra Design Museum, Germany: June 6 – October 14, 2018Israel-born designer Ron Arad has notably shied away from convention and pushed boundaries to marvellous effect throughout his career. Whether it’s crafting a novel armchair from a discarded leather Rover 90 car seat or bending sheet steel to create furniture, Arad’s designs are constantly ahead of their time, owing to his improvisatory methods and penchant for using found objects. The Vitra Design Museum’s retrospective will also resurrect Arad’s ‘Sticks and Stones Machine’ first crafted in 1987, which “[eats] chairs and metal objects and then disgorges them in the form of pressed cubes”.



The Riga International Biennial of Contemporary Art: June 2 – October 28, 2018Back for its third edition, the Riga Biennial looks to highlight the best in contemporary art in the Baltic states. Head to the Latvian capital for a vast range of work by artists who engage with their landscape and context, responding to the cultural and geographical idiosyncrasies of the region. The type of work ranges from collage and photography to large-scale installations, and archive film by the likes of Jonas Mekas, and subjects include the underground queer and techno scene in Kiev and the exploration of alternative futures.



Ryan Hewett: The Garden at Unit London, June 29 – July 22, 2018The inaugural exhibition in vast new Mayfair gallery space from Unit London will be The Garden, a survey of work by South African artist Ryan Hewett. Graphic, bold, and featuring elements of fantasy and the surreal, Hewett’s large-scale portraits and landscapes are fascinating in their disjointed familiarity.



Christo and Jeanne-Claude: Barrels and the Mastaba 1958–2018 at the Serpentine, London: June 19 – September 9, 2018Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s Mastaba project has been planned since 1977, and – partly in tribute to his late partner, who died in 2009 – Christo is set to introduce it as a permanent gargantuan structure in Abu Dhabi made entirely of barrels stacked horizontally. A version of it will float on the Serpentine lake this summer, coinciding with an exhibition of Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s innovative use of barrels in their work – which encompasses, of course, the wrapping of islands and monuments across the globe – at the Hyde Park gallery of the same name. Illustrated with sculptures, scale models, drawings, collages and photographs, this show is a rare chance to understand what goes into making the duo’s incredible creations, and the Mastaba on the Serpentine marks the first time one of their pieces has been shown in public in Britain.  



June Event Series at LAXART: June 4 – July 3, 2018Hilton Als, Kim Gordon and Adam Linder are just some of those involved in LAXART’s June Event Series, a month-long programme of exciting talks, performances, concerts, and theatre. The series is free to enjoy, and promises to be a radical celebration of what is at the heart of the Los Angeles space – championing groundbreaking endeavours in art and creation – to mark the opening of its new gallery. Highlights include: I Heart Poetry and Day Drinking, a poetry reading and cocktail event; Kim Gordon and Leila Bordreuil on guitar and cello respectively in an improvised concert; and a discussion on black radical thought and activism, stemming from the effect of Black Panther.



1968: One Year, An American Odyssey at the National Portrait Gallery, Washington DC: June 29, 2018 – May 19, 20191968 was an important year in American history: space landings, the Olympic games, the Civil Rights Act and the Vietnam War all shaped the country’s social and political landscape. It was also the year that Washington DC opened its National Portrait Gallery, thus it’s fitting that the institution look back on its opening era through photography and painting that have come to define it. Expect appearances from Janis Joplin, Apollo 8 astronauts and Martin Luther King Jr. among the impactful works on display.



Machines à Penser at the Fondazione Prada, Venice: until November 25, 2018Philosophy is at the heart of Machines à Penser, the Fondazione Prada’s installation in Venice. The three 20th-century philosophers that the show spotlights – Adorno, Heidegger and Wittgenstein – have isolation in common, and each retreated to huts at some stage in their lives. Thus, the exhibition centres on Ian Hamilton Finlay’s Adorno’s Hut, a 1987 recreation of the first philosopher’s sacred space, and two further architectural interpretations of huts belonging to the other noted thinkers. It’s a space that looks to inspire reflection, aided by photographs, ceramics and works of art.  



Space of Contemplation at the Korean Cultural Centre, London: June 7 – July 21, 2018Head to London’s Korean Cultural Centre for a glimpse at one of the region’s most exciting international artists, Jhoen Soocheon, whose arresting, experimental installations are being exhibited. Soocheon takes historical stories and reinterprets them as large-scale, highly unique pieces – one such installation is made of stainless steel mirrors and references a 15th century poem; another takes the form of a cube made of 35,000 individual components; and a work in 2005 saw the artist wrap an entire train in white fabric, that went on to travel thousands of kilometres across America (but is naturally not on show in London today).



The Power of Sympathy: The Photography of Dagmar Hochovà at the Czech Centre, London: June 20 – 29, 2018For a fleeting moment this month you can catch the resounding images of Czech photographer Dagmar Hochovà, who trained her lens on life in her home country during the Communist years. During tense decades in the late 20th century, Hochovà set about capturing the everyday, and particularly children in Czechoslovakia. The innocence she shot is juxtaposed with her photographs of the Prague Spring in 1968 and the Velvet Revolution 20 years later, which resulted in the end of one-party rule in the country. Rarely seen in the UK, Hochovà’s photographs are a telling testament to the life – the everyday, the political, and the cultural – around her in the latter half of the 20th century.



Alexander Calder: From the Stony River to the Sky at Hauser & Wirth, Somerset: until September 9, 2018Alexander Calder’s kinetic sculptures are filling the gallery spaces and grounds of Hauser & Wirth Somerset in a mammoth exhibition of the American artist’s work. Not only are his mobiles, figures and vivid sculptures on show, but myriad domestic objects that he created for his home are revealed for the first time too. Calder made furniture (chairs, tables, lamps), jewellery and household objects (a chess set, for example) throughout his life, and favoured innovation in whatever he was creating; Roxbury, his Connecticut home and studio, and its impact on his practice is a central focus point of the exhibition, from his decision to create outdoor pieces to the use of found objects from the local country in his work.



Antiques Anonymous at Church Street, Marylebone: June 24, 2018Fans of antique hunting will flock to Church Street at the end of this month for Antiques Anonymous, a one-day Flea Market on the legendary shopping street. Over 70 dealers from across London will take to the streets for the market’s second edition, and street food and live music will be on offer alongside a wide array of vintage finds.



The Best in Film

June has arrived, bringing with it a fantastic array of new films to help while away the cooler summer evenings. French auteur Francois Ozon returns with L’Amant Double, an absurd but tense thriller about a vulnerable young woman (Marine Vacth) who falls for her psychotherapist, only to discover he’s concealing a major part of his identity. My Friend Dahmer is Marc Meyers’ chilling investigation into the teenage years of notorious serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer in the build up to his first murder. A compelling portrait of psychopathy ensues, fuelled by a mesmerising performance from Ross Lynch as the disturbed murderer-in-the-making. With its 100% Rotten Tomatoes score Ari Aster’s Hereditary, is being billed as the art-house horror unlike anything you’ve seen, and we’re intrigued. It is the story of Annie Graham (Toni Collette) whose life begins to unravel following the death of her elderly mother, as she and her family begin exploring their ancestry with truly terrifying results.
Don’t miss Italian drama A Ciambra, the story of Pio Amato, a 14-year-old troublemaker, desperate to prove himself to his older brother. Many a hair-raising escapade ensues in this raw and accomplished coming-of-age study. Leave No Trace meanwhile, from Winter’s Bone director Debra Granik, follows a father and his teenage daughter whose unusual but idyllic off-the-grid existence in a forest in Portland, Oregon is shattered when they are reported to social services. The film follows their traumatic and testing journey to find a place to call their own to extremely powerful effect.



Documentary fans are in for a treat this month, thanks to an abundance of brilliant new offerings. There’s McQueen, Ian Bonhôte and Peter Ettedgui’s emotional and illuminating exploration of the life of the late British visionary, whose genius changed the face of fashion. There’s Tranny Fag spotlighting the inspiring transgender singer Linn da Quebrada, who uses her explicit brand of electro-funk to highlight the plight of Brazil’s marginalised communities. Boom For Real, from Sara Driver, is a brilliant portrait of Jean-Michel Basquiat’s teenage years and the influence of late 70s New York, and its bubbling creative scene, upon his idiosyncratic oeuvre. Supplement your New York nostalgia with Studio 54, a vibrant portrayal of the fabled 70s nightclub, and the hedonistic disco days it cultivated. Grey Gardens lovers, rejoice! A sublime prequel to the beloved story of Big Edie and Little Edie – the eccentric mother and daughter duo living a life of faded grandeur in a dilapidated Long Island estate – is headed your way in the form of That Summer, from Göran Olsson. The film takes us back in time to 1972, inviting us into the Beales’ lives three years before the Mayles’s landmark movie introduced them to the world.



Food and Drink

Brigadiers, Bloomberg Arcade, London: opening June 6, 2018The latest from the powerhouse sibling team behind Hoppers, Trishna and Gymkhana is Brigadiers, which opens within the Bloomberg Arcade next week. The USP here is whisky, Indian barbecue, and live sports (no doubt the chicest ‘sports bar’ you’ll ever set foot in) and dishes and cocktails are designed for sharing, emulating the fundamentally social aspect of Indian army mess bars.



OOM Supper Club, Brixton Pound Cafe, London: June 9, 2018Inspired by Jamaican cuisine and aiming to tackle the island’s growing plastic pollution issues, OOM Supper Club is an “immersive, plant-based dining experience” comprising three courses of delectable-sounding food (jerk plantain slaw and coconut gizzada tart, for example) geared to draw attention to healthy consumption.



ROVI: opening June 21, 2018Be sure to visit ROVI this summer, a new venture from Ottolenghi. Enjoy fire-grilled peaches and scallops with cucumber kombucha – cooked over fire and fermentation are key cooking methods here – in the Bauhaus-inspired dining room, or simply a cocktail at the bar in the impressive space. 



Giant Steps, Hackney Wick: until September 23, 2018A summer party pop-up like no other, Giant Steps comes from Dalston restaurant Brilliant Corners and the Analogue Foundation to hold outdoor events combining music, food and drink in East London until September. Jazz performances in the day make way for renowned DJs in the evenings, and summery cocktails, natural wines and bespoke barbecue offerings punctuate the space.



Great Performances

There are lots of reasons to slink out of the sun and into the theatre this June. If you haven’t visited fringe theatre venue The Bunker yet, now’s your chance. The intimate space is hosting a new festival dubbed Breaking Out, giving a platform to brilliant emerging companies like Poke in the Eye, whose play Libby’s Eyes is an experimental tale of a young woman operating in a world she’s unable to see, and Sleepless, whose show Nine Foot Nine envisions a world in which “every self-identifying women suddenly grows to nine foot nine inches.” Meanwhile Birmingham International Dance Festival is back for its sixth edition this month, featuring ten UK premieres, from Compagnie Didier Theron’s tongue-in-cheek production AIR, featuring pink, barbapapa-like costumes to the spellbinding light sculpting choreography of Czech Vera Ondrasikova & Collective. While Midlands Made offers up a programme dedicated to spotlighting UK talent, curated by esteemed choreographers Wayne McGregor and Rosie Kay.
For those of you who missed The Jungle, Joe Murphy and Joe Robertson’s much acclaimed depiction of life in the now-destroyed migrant camp in Calais, now’s your chance as it transfers to the West End in mid-June. An immersive experience that draws on the playwrights’ experiences after setting up their own production company alongside the camp, it packs a powerful and provocative punch. Be sure to catch Cordelia Lynn’s One For Sorrow at the Royal Court, the story of 20-year-old Imogen who offers refuge to the victim of a London terrorist attack without asking her family’s permission. Enter John, who the play’s blurb reveals “is different to them… [not] what they expected. And although they’d never admit it to themselves, [not] necessarily what they want.” An accompanying quote – “You will do anything, in the end, to keep the people you love safe” – suggests that things do not go well. Enticingly ominous stuff.






 

Weegee the Famous: The Master of Down-and-Dirty Street Photography

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Arthur Fellig, a.k.a. Weegee, with his Speed Graphic camera around 1944.CreditPhotograph by Weegee (Arthur Fellig)/International Center of Photography

  • FLASH
    The Making of Weegee the Famous
    By Christopher Bonanos
    Illustrated. 379 pp. Henry Holt & Company. $32.
    To write a concise history of the showboating, hard-boiled photographer known as Weegee, you’d do well to follow the advice of Christopher Bonanos, the author of “Flash: The Making of Weegee the Famous.” Keep your eye on the evolution of the photographer’s name, for that is the story of Weegee.
    He was born in the Eastern European town of Zolochev (in what is now Ukraine) in 1899 as Usher Felig. When his family got to Ellis Island, Usher Felig became Arthur Fellig (aged 10). It was under this name that as a teenager he found his beloved profession, when a street photographer made a portrait of him. Fellig was transfixed by the camera, the plate, the processing and the picture of himself. After that, Bonanos writes, “he never wanted to do anything else.”
    At age 14 he quit school and soon began working freelance for various New York newspapers and news agencies (especially Acme) while taking on odd jobs. One involved taking pictures of coffins for a catalog; another involved squeegeeing photographic prints for The New York Times. In fact, some think the name Weegee is a shortening of Squeegee Boy, although the better-known story, promoted by Weegee, is that he had a supernatural ability, like a Ouija board, to forecast a decisive photographic moment.
    Fellig’s earliest street photography career was aided by a pony he’d bought and named Hypo, after the chemical solution used to process pictures. Here’s how Fellig would get a sale: “We’d find a kid, put him on the pony, take the picture and then try to peddle it to the kid’s mother, 5 cents a print.” The trick to the game was washing the child’s face, and, as Bonanos puts it, getting “a picture that even a poor family couldn’t resist.” The process, from pony to picture, was jokingly called “kidnapping.”
    Hypo didn’t earn his keep, however, and Fellig moved on to news photography. Eventually he managed to break away from the pack of anonymous scrappy news photographers to become Weegee, the man with a knack for getting to murders, fires, suicides and crashes at exactly the right moment. How? His main advantages were living right down the street from Police Headquarters on Centre Street and not having a steady job or family (because he never wanted, as he said, “a hot dinner, a husky kid”), which meant he could stay up all night chasing crime, fires, accidents and women. (Most fires, he noted, would happen at 1 or 2 a.m. “Five o’clock is the jumping time — people are out of liquor.”)
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    CreditSonny Figueroa/The New York Times
    Of course, there was more to it than that. Weegee had a gift for telling a great story, then stretching it into an even better story, often starring himself. At every crucial turn in his career, Bonanos argues, Weegee was working just as hard at his own image as at his craft. Once, in 1936, he photographed a murdered man whose body had been stuffed in a steamer trunk — a sight too gruesome for most newspapers. Fellig’s shot, made at night with his box camera, flash and shutter release cord, was funny; it showed him peering into the trunk. Here, the subject wasn’t the body but the audience’s reaction to it. And, in this case, the audience was the photographer. Yes, Weegee wasn’t only a showboat but a man with an eye for black humor.
    Many of Weegee’s iconic shots — guilty bodies, distraught bodies, naked bodies, curious bodies, sleeping bodies, bodies watching movies, crowds of bodies, mostly from the late 1930s and early 1940s — focus on spectators. For instance, in October 1941, a small-time gambler was shot at night near a schoolyard. In addition to photographing the body, Weegee shot the crowd of children pushing one another to see the dead man. This photograph is, as Bonanos observes, an amazing catalog of human emotion, from agony to glee. The biggest star is a girl whose face registers insane excitement and curiosity. Weegee titled it “Their First Murder.” Did I mention he had a gift for words?
    In the mid-1940s Weegee added to his repertoire — documenting not only low life but bohemian life (at Sammy’s Bowery Follies) and high life, too. Many of these pictures involve what Bonanos terms “the New York observer, observed.” In 1943, at the opening of the Metropolitan Opera, Weegee photographed two dowagers in white furs and jewels smiling grimly at the camera, while on the darkened sideline a woman in a dirty coat and stole assesses them. Without the frump and without Weegee’s brilliant title, “The Critic,” this wouldn’t be a Weegee. So it’s no shock that once he got famous, Weegee was occasionally accused of “stocking the pond,” which meant, in this case, bringing his own frump. (By the way, she looks very much like one of Weegee’s cross-dressing friends.)
    In 1940 Weegee became one of the founding photographers at PM, a new liberal paper devoted to telling stories with photographs. There the editors weren’t interested just in Weegee’s photographs but also in his wiseass persona, his bug-eyed face, his huge Speed Graphic camera, his car trunk stuffed with equipment, his nocturnal habits, his slovenly ways and his tall tales. He became a champ at producing “tick-tocks” — first-person stories, told with pictures and words.
    The turning point in Weegee’s career — and, some say, the tragedy of it — was having his work exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in the mid-1940s. He began thinking of himself as an artist. He took to calling himself “Weegee the Famous” and stamped his photos thus. He learned how to distort photographs. He got married. He gave up his digs near Police Headquarters. He produced art books, starting with “Naked City.” And he was called to Hollywood. Weegee the Famous became a caricature of himself. In the late 1940s and 1950s he often played the part of a hard-boiled photographer doing tough-guy stuff in Hollywood movies. And by the 1960s, he was acting in schlocky girlie movies in New York and England, portraying his own lust. In a British film called “My Bare Lady,” Weegee played the part of a nude popeyed judge in a nudist beauty contest.
    Weegee did, however, have a last hurrah in the 1960s. Stanley Kubrick knew Weegee (they were both press photographers in the 1940s) and hired him to take stills during the filming of “Dr. Strangelove.” In the end, Weegee left two marks on the movie. First, Peter Sellers, who was fascinated with Weegee, borrowed his high-pitched voice for the character of Dr. Strangelove. And second, if not for Weegee’s stills, we wouldn’t know that “‘Dr. Strangelove’ was meant to end with an enormous slapstick pie fight in the War Room,” as Bonanos notes. “Kubrick later decided that it was too glib a finale for a story about nuclear annihilation, and he rewrote and reshot the ending.” But Weegee had already caught some unbelievable shots of himself, Kubrick and Sellers covered in custard. Who knew?
    Because Weegee was inseparable from his work, this biography is mostly a photograph-by-photograph tour (Bonanos, the city editor at New York magazine, is also the author of “Instant: The Story of Polaroid”); sadly, though, some of the photographs discussed aren’t reproduced in the book. What comes through about Weegee is that he was ambitious, original, energetic, inventive, egalitarian (except when it came to women) and witty. Other than that, he’s a shell. Weegee’s life story is basically “The Picture of Dorian Gray.” As Fellig became Weegee, the real man vanished. Eventually Weegee couldn’t keep up with his name and wanted to go back: “My real name is Arthur Fellig. … I created this monster, Weegee, and I can’t get rid of it.” At age 69 he died of a brain tumor. Tellingly, one of the book’s most poignant moments comes after he dies, when the photographer Diane Arbus knocks on the door of Weegee’s friend Wilma Wilcox and finds herself ankle-deep in 8,000 prints, diving in to save the best. The sight of Arbus wading through these images would have made, I think, a great Weegee picture.

    Etherial Images From A Broken Leica Camera

    These days I spend most of my time living and traveling between Serbia, Hungary, Ukraine, and Finland, exploring and researching the global analog photography scene as best I can. I do this for my own personal endeavors such as my store, Cameraville.co, as well as my continuing journey with Camerarescue.org (formerly Cameraventures), headed by Juho Leppänen, which I will get into a bit later.

    Just last week on my 6th visit to Serbia I found a pretty good deal on a 1951 Leica IIIf screw mount camera body. After a few consultations with Google Translate, I met a man named Milos in front of the Belgrade National Theater to inspect the camera. Cosmetically it was flawless, no dings, no scratches, no paint loss, no modifications, a true beauty. Costing $3,500 (€3,000) in today’s money with a 50mm Summitar lens upon its release in 1950, it’s easy to understand why this camera might have been so well taken care of over the years.


    After checking that all the shutter speeds worked correctly I removed the lens to discover the shutter curtain was horribly cracked, a common indication that a camera spent a few decades idle on a shelf.
    The shutter curtain is meant to keep the light-sensitive film fully protected in darkness until sliding out of the way for the duration of the shutter speed when the shutter button is pressed, properly exposing an image through the lens and onto the film. With a cracked curtain light continuously leaks through onto the film in an unpredictable and uncontrolled manner.
    I knew the odds were good that the light leaks were severe enough to warrant a repair but – how much would it cost, how long, and by who? These answers were unknown to me but I knew Juho would have them. So with the Leica in one hand and my money in the other, I found the hand with the money slowly reaching out to Milos. All there was left to do was shoot a test roll to see how bad the damage was.


    The next day I loaded it up with some [sadly] discontinued Agfa Vista color film, which I had just purchased 15 rolls of from a source in Budapest. I took a walk to Kalemegdan Park to shoot pictures of the 3rd Century BC Belgrade Fortress. There I stumbled upon opening day of a food and music festival which made for plenty to shoot. I finished the roll just as the sun had set and took the film to get developed in the morning. Immediately I was disappointed as all of the images looked to be ruined. In fact, I would describe the severity of the damage as “oh s**t” on a scale of “eh-not-too-bad to oh-s**t”.
    But as I began to view them one at a time I began to question what actually made them ruined? I captured the scene, I got the composition I wanted, the focus I wanted, and my sunny 16 math was on-point. Wait a minute am I actually – “Hey these little fairy dusty orby things are kind of cool!” I found myself thinking.












    Leaving the wonders of fairyland and coming back to earth, the big picture was that I am not a special effects shooter and I would definitely need to repair my new Leica to give me predictable results. Coincidentally the day I shot with the Leica was the very day that Cameraventures closed and announced its split into Kamerastore.com and Camerarescue.org, whom I have been working with intermittently for nearly a year.
    While Kamerastore sells cameras, Camerarescue has the goal to rescue 100,000 analog cameras by 2020 among other things. And we have just released our analog camera repair shop data helping connect people with problems such as mine to a qualified repair person in their region. If you want to sell or donate gear, need a repair shop, or have any knowledge to share about the existence of any analog camera repair shops please consider visiting camerarescue.org.

     

    There’s been a positive response to efforts to create a community darkroom in Doylestown PA area

     

    More than 100 photo enthusiasts have expressed an interest in creating a community dark room in the Doylestown area, say organizers of the effort. For some photographers, it’s all about film and the “magic” of the darkroom process.
    When Claire Elaine posted a message on Facebook recently asking if anyone was interested in helping create a community darkroom, she never guessed there was already a group excited to do just that.
    Elaine and her husband, Ryan McDonald, who live in Doylestown Borough, are self-described “hobby” photographers who love film and the art of developing it in a darkroom. “The most fun part is doing the developing,” said Elaine, who also enjoys pottery and ceramics. Both thought having a place in the Doylestown area where similar-minded folks could share a space was a great idea.
    Stephen Buerkle agreed wholeheartedly. The Plumstead man had the same thought late in 2016 and more than 100 people responded to his similar inquiry to begin a Bucks County Darkroom Collective. “There was a huge amount of interest,” said Buerkle, who also designs “virtual reality experiences” for industrial and healthcare businesses.
    While that effort didn’t get off the ground, the three film photography enthusiasts hope it will this time.
    Elaine said she was delighted when Buerkle reached out and the two met. “He’s really championing it.”
    Unlike digital photography and all that photo-editing software can do, film photography, said Buerkle, “shows exactly what the photographer saw.” And developing film in a darkroom is unlike anything else.
    “It’s literally like magic, pulling it from the developing bath, that one moment when you see it and it’s right,” he said.
    The effort to create a community darkroom is in its early stages and is contingent upon finding the right location, which will need a source of water and electricity, the organizers said.
    Ideally, the space will also have room for a gallery and, down the road, perhaps, educational classes.
    To learn more about the project, email bcdarkroom@gmail.com, or visit http://bit.ly/BucksDarkroom

    Canon will stop selling film cameras

    Canon has announced it will stop selling the EOS 1V, the company’s last film camera.
    From here on out, new Canon cameras will be entirely digital. Manufacturing of the last film camera actually ended eight years ago in 2010, but a backlog of stocks has kept Canon selling the model up until now.
    Photographers will undoubtedly mourn the end of film photography from Canon, but most will likely accept the reality was forthcoming.
    Canon was relaxed in the statement it made on the company website. “Thank you very much for your continued patronage of Canon products,” the statement reads, via translation. “By the way, we are finally decided to end sales for the film single lens reflex camera ‘EOS-1v’.”

    GettyImages-526356205 Canon has announced it will no longer sell film cameras.
    Anyone who wants to keep shooting with film can switch to Nikon (which is not an easy ask, considering the sharply divided loyalty of customers between the two companies.) Nikon's FM10 and F6 both still use film and are available to buy.
    Canon is legally required to fix broken EOS-1V models up until the end of October 2020. It has also pledged to offer repairs through to October 31, 2025, but warns that fixes beyond 2020 are dependent on inventory and the availability of parts.
    “Although it is truly selfish, thank you for your kind understanding of the circumstances,” Canon wrote on its website.
    It is the first time since the 1930s that Canon has not sold a film camera.
    The Japanese company was founded in 1937 and built its first digital camera in 1984—the RC-701. It also manufactures printers, scanners, camcorders, calculators and flash units.
    Anyone feeling nostalgic likely won’t have any trouble picking up a second-hand film camera online, however. A quick search of Amazon shows you can find one for around $100 - at least until nostalgia and vintage values begin to build.