me studio

…out of the 30-40,000 negatives I have in the collection, about 10-15,000 negatives were still in rolls, undeveloped from the 1960’s-1970’s. I have been successfully developing these rolls. I still have about 600 rolls yet to develop. I must say, it’s very exciting for me. Most of her negatives that were developed in sleeves have the date and location penciled in French (she had poor penmanship)…

this a great story i picked up from ‘design observer’: an american fella ‘john maloof’ who acquired a set of negatives in an auction that turned out to be the complete oeuvre of an unknown chicago street photographer vivian maier, there are some really beautiful images in there and a stunning visual history of a city too… he tried to find her when it became obvious what he had bought but she sadly passed away just before he got the chance to meet her…

Bernard F. Eilers was a colour magician. Around 1935, he created the photographic colour separation technique foto-chroma Eilers, which would make him world famous. In a time when experiments with colour photography were abundant, he succeeded in producing colour prints that far surpassed those of other fellow pioneers in terms of colour intensity and depth.

The Great Depression of the 1930s was not a good time for Eilers; few people could afford to enlist the services of a photographer. In these years, he decided to devote his leisure time to perfecting three-colour photography. His aim was to expose and print three shots on paper in a single turn. For more than a year and a half, he worked at improving the camera, the filters and the printing foils. Finally, Eilers succeeded in producing perfect colour prints. He named his technique: foto-chroma eilers. The difficult feat he had accomplished brought Eilers praise and honour, but the big photographic industries of the day soon caught up with him; around the same time, Kodak and Agfa introduced the first modern colour films.

interesting story & fascinating set of images by local photographer ‘bernard eijlers’ on flickr, there is also a you tube version but it doesn’t really add much except some dodgy background music and the old ‘ken burns’ effect with fuzzy images… the image below, (bottom right) is actually in the street where i live next to my house….

‘…When Michael Wolf and I first sat down to discuss the images contained in this book, Wolf pointed out one shot in particular. Like the photographer in Michelangelo Antonioni?s classic film Blow Up, Wolf had found himself working late in the studio one night, going over a batch of recent photos from Chicago. The photos were of buildings, of course?very large buildings, with lots of windows, like J. G. Ballard?s high-rise. At some point in the evening, Wolf zoomed in randomly on one of the windows while scanning the image for flaws. But he noticed something: there was a man in the photograph?and he was giving Wolf the finger.’

photographer michael wolf produces some very intriguing and voyeuristic imagery