All artwork presented in this column is (c) the respective artists, and may not be copied, altered or re-used without express written permission.
Greetings Cyberspace, and welcome to another "Keepers Of Light". This month I thought I'd do something a little different, and take this opportunity to share some of my own kept light with you. We'll be looking at some of the images from "No Exit", an exhibition first mounted at the L.S.P.U. Hall in St. John's Newfoundland in 1982.
The L.S.P.U. Hall
Located on beautiful Victoria Street in downtown St. John's the L.S.P.U. Hall is an artist-run performance and exhibition space. At one time the building was one of the largest in town, and was the meeting hall for the Long Shoreman's Protective Union from which it gets the name. The Hall, as it's called, remained in the union's hands until the late seventies when it was purchased by the Resource Foundation for the Arts, and became home to the Mummer's Troupe, a professional theatre group led by Chris Brookes. The building was renovated and upgraded in the mid-80's, and now lives on as the Resource Centre for the Arts. There are dozens of plays and special events at the hall throughout the year. There is theatre, dance, musical events, and in the gallery, exhibitions by local artists and photographers.
It was for one such event, a Michael Wade production of Sartre's "No Exit", that I was approached to do a poster. I had had several ideas for the poster, none very exciting, and the deadline was fast approaching. I decided to escape work for the afternoon and go on a picnic with a friend of mine and her young son. We packed up into my disintegrating Volkswagen and drove around to the south side of the harbour. At the mouth of the harbour, overlooking the famous narrows is a well known, but seldom visited souvenir from World War II. The Americans took an interest in the strategic value of St. John's during the war and, apparently expecting U-boats or some other sort of floating trouble, the US Naval Engineers were called on to build huge reinforced gun emplacements and ammo dumps at the entrance to the harbour. These strange concrete bunkers and boxes have weathered and crumbled in a most interesting way, and the incomparable north Atlantic light turns the scene into a spooky alien landscape.
I puttered around in the ruins for hours, in amazement at the quality of the light and totally forgetting lunch until my young companion began to complain of boredom and hunger. I looked up and he had curled up into a ball in the square window opening in a thick concrete wall. The light from outside streamed in around him. I snapped a picture. Then another and another. I began to see where I would get the No Exit poster shot, and what my next photography project would be.
I returned to my home and rushed straight into the darkroom to develop the negatives. They were all I'd hoped for and more. They were brilliant negatives, impossible negatives. I immediately started to print them. They were very difficult to interpret. The highlights were incandescent where direct sunlight played on the lime formations that seeped from the cracks in the walls, and in the same negative there would be a window into another room with detail in shadows that were black with age and gloom.
I printed the bulk of the show on Agfa Portriga paper, and naturally made extensive use of dodging and burning to bring out the details in a number of the images, but most of them required surprisingly little manipulation. Others, such as the poster shot, I decided to alter with a printing-out- posterization technique. The range of lighting and the strangeness of the location made for exciting posterizations, and yet it also meant that the altered images coexisted with their less exotic neighbors in the exhibition without seeming loud or gratuitous. The overall effect is one of harmony.
As soon as practical, I returned to the site, this time with three models. It was the first experience they had had with modeling (aside from birthday pictures and so on) and they were terrific sports, I must say. They all worked hard to give me whatever feeling I would ask for, and never complained if I made them crawl up walls or jump up in the air thirty times in a row. And they worked for cheeseburgers, something today's models might not consider.
All in all, I'm extremely pleased with the way the shoots worked out, and the prints are some of my most prized. I hope you enjoy them.
- Kent Barrett, Vancouver, Canada
