Fuji Neopan 400: Fort Jackson, LA

I shot one of my precious rolls of Fuji Neopan 400 at Fort Jackson, I thought all that brick would make a good subject for B&W.

I like this photo because of how the little figures in the distance tricks your perspective into thinking that downed tree is huuuuuge–it was pretty big, but not THAT big!

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roll from the Diana F+: LeBeau Plantation and Jefferson Island

I shot this roll a while ago but didn’t sent it to Dwayne’s right away; I find it more cost-effective to send at least 2 rolls at a time. So I waited until I had another roll to go with it (which I will probably post tomorrow).

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slide-a-palooza

I got a package in the mail Saturday from one of my snail mail pals. It was pretty large and felt like a magazine; it actually turned out to contain over 100 old Kodak slides! She’s a public/found artist and is always picking up goofy stuff from thrift stores and garage sales.

Most of them appear to have been shot in the San Diego area in the early ’80s-early ’90s, judging from notes that were written on the frames and the archival sleeves they were stored in.

When I showed them to my brother, he said “I bet you see a murder being committed!” (I think we watched too many Brian De Palma movies as children.) It took me about an hour and a half to sort through them all; no murders, but when I picked up the pile one slide fell out at random, and I held it up to the light:

I haven’t been 23 in a while, but I can still recognize a marijuana plant.

Hilarity aside, whoever took these photos was actually a really good photographer. They took a lot of macros, photos of the ocean, food photographs that could be in a magazine.

They took a lot of photos of this cat; this one is my favorite. (There’s also a lot of photos of a dog.)

It’s a cherry in an ice cube. I don’t know, I like it.

It is HARD to take close-ups of insects, they tend not to stay still.

I eventually sorted them all into the following categories: animals, mountains/hills, interiors/still lifes, sunsets, light blurs (you know, like when you take a photo from a moving car at night), trees, plants (including about a dozen pot plants and one slide of a huge, hairy bud), food, landscapes w/ buildings, and beaches/ocean (which composed about 1/3 of the slides).

I’d like to make something like this with them, although probably on a smaller scale. Or maybe I could do like a lampshade, somehow? That would look cool, too. I probably have enough slides for both ideas, actually.

I lined a few up along my windowsill, just to get an idea of what they look like. (There’s a strip of metal behind them, they’ll look better without that.) I have a northeast-facing window and I only get a few fleeting moments of direct sunlight early in the morning, so I don’t think fading would be much of a problem. I’d like to eventually scan them all, so the images themselves won’t be destroyed even if they do fade (or I inadvertently destroy them playing Martha Stewart).

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Blackbird Fly: Our Lady of Lavang & Holt Cemetery

The film camera I took on my most recent NOLA outing was the Blackbird Fly, a plastic 35mm TLR  rangefinder made by Superheadz (they also made my Golden Half). I haven’t used it in a while and I was considering selling it, but thought I should use it one more time before I made up my mind. I remembered it as difficult to use, but I think that’s because when I last used it I didn’t yet have much experience with rangefinders. Since then I’ve used several (and I collect Arguses, which are all rangefinders); my Yashica MG1 is my go-to camera for B&W, and even my Smena 8M is a rangefinder.

The only drawbacks to the Blackbird Fly is that a) it’s difficult to take horizontal photos, instead of using the viewfinder you have to compose your photo through a cut-out in the viewfinder hood, and that’s never a 100% accurate way to frame; and b) you have to really concentrate on getting your subjects level. I remember the first roll I shot looked like I had done it in a rowboat. And unless it’s really overcast or you’re shooting indoors, you need to stick to low-speed film (this is Kodak Ektar 100), because there are only 2 aperture settings to the camera–sunny and cloudy/flash–and both of them are fairly wide, I think F11 and F8. With higher speed film, 400 or even 200, in a camera with a normal range of aperture settings, I usually stop it all the way down to F16 when it’s a sunny day.

Anyway, I think I’ll keep it for now. It’s a little unusual to find a TLR that’s also a rangefinder, and the camera itself is fun to use and even rather cute. And like most rangefinders (except my Yashica, which has an in-viewfinder focus aid that allows you to be really accurate), the fact that you’re never 100% right about the distance from your subjects results in an appealingly soft focus.

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Holt Cemetery, New Orleans

My quest to photograph every cemetery in NOLA continues. Holt is the city’s cemetery for indigent people; as such it’s the only one to still practice in-ground burial, and many of the markers are hand-made by family members. It’s out on City Park Avenue, which I sometimes refer to as “the nexus of the universe”, because there are over a half dozen large cemeteries within a few square miles–I’ve photographed Greenwood and Cypress Grove already. I almost didn’t find this one, it’s behind the campus of Delgado Community College. The third time I drove past, I noticed a little side road leading onto the campus called “Buddy Bolden Road”, and I remembered that he’s buried in Holt, so I turned onto it and it led me right to the cemetery.

Weird thing abut Bolden, I keep stumbling across him. I read Coming Through Slaughter a couple of months ago, which is a fictionalized version of his life. (EJ Bellocq is also a character in it, and just before I read it I visited the cemetery he’s buried in and saw his mausoleum.) Not long after, we had the meetup in Jackson, which I planned before I read the book. Jackson is where the Eastern Louisiana Mental Health System is, where Bolden spent years (he was schizophrenic). And then I found out that a relative of mine–by marriage only–was also incarcerated there (although after Bolden had died there), after he tried to kill his wife, my great-grandmother’s sister. I’d always known about that, but not where he was sent.

Holt is a far cry from most NOLA cemeteries, with their grand mausoleums and towering marble monuments. The plots are inches from each other; the grass is shaggy and dotted with clover like an improbable May snowdrift. Graveyards almost never feel sad to me, merely peaceful, but this one has a melancholy that’s almost enjoyable–like when you press on a bruise. It hurts, but there’s something compelling about it, too. I don’t know, maybe it’s only because it’s the first cemetery I’ve been to since my grandmother died, but the people buried here seem more real to me than the occupants of those fancy above-ground tombs. People loved them enough to build a monument with their bare hands and whatever tools and material they could afford.

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Our Lady of Lavang, New Orleans

Our Lady of Lavang is a Catholic church in Gentilly (the most racially diverse neighborhood in NOLA) with a 100% Vietnamese congregation. The mass is conducted in Vietnamese, and the shrine is an interesting mix of traditional Vietnamese architecture and Catholic iconography. Our Lady of Lavang was a Marian apparition that occurred in Vietnam in the 19th century, at a time when Catholics in that country were being persecuted. The Vatican has never authenticated it, but JP2 allowed as it was “important”. To keeping the coffers full among the Vietnamese diaspora, no doubt. HEY-O.

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Lomographers of Acadiana: Fort Jackson

April’s meetup had to be re-scheduled because of Granny’s funeral, so it was last Saturday. I chose Fort Jackson in Plaquemines Parish, a decommissioned masonry fort from the 1820s. There are a lot of those south of New Orleans, but most of them are closed right now because of Hurricane Isaac. I didn’t find anything online that said Fort Jackson was closed, and in fact there was a Civil War re-enactment there just a couple of weeks ago, so that must mean it’s open, right?

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*bangs head repeatedly on nearest hard horizontal surface*

FUCKING LOUISIANA, I SWEAR. Of the many, many things that are annoying about this state, top of my list right now is that our parks and historic sites are constantly getting shut down due to hurricanes. And since fixing them up isn’t a budget priority, they stay shut for months or sometimes even years–and then by the time they get them open again, oh hey look out, here comes ANOTHER FUCKING HURRICANE. Katrina shut all the forts down for so long that they were only open for about 18 months before Isaac came along and shut them all down again.

What’s frustrating is there were still lots of people there; even just the outside is pretty interesting, and it’s right on the river. If they opened it and charged a small fee, they would probably have enough money to fix it up by the end of the summer. Maybe I’ll write a letter to whoever is in charge of parks and rec for the state. I’m not going to bother with Jindal, because he’s a Rethug douchebag who doesn’t give a shit about this state outside of how he can use it as a springboard to higher office. Good luck with that, brah.

However, driving through Plaquemines Parish gave me an idea for another shoot. I kept seeing signs for a town called Pointe a la Hache, which I thought sounded interesting, so I Googled it when I got home. It’s the parish seat, but it’s very near where Katrina made landfall, so it got pretty wrecked and only about 200 residents have returned since the storm. So it’s got kind of a ghost town vibe, and there are a lot of ruined buildings. The courthouse was damaged by arson over a decade ago and has been left as is, there’s been a “temporary” courthouse in nearby Belle Chasse since. The parish council has tried 3 times to move the seat to Belle Chasse, but it always gets rejected. Louisianans: we love to pay lip service about how much we cherish our history, but we don’t want to actually spend any money on preserving it. *sigh*

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