In the footsteps of the magic lantern show:

15 December 2010

Figurative artist RA Friedman is once again bringing his unique craft directly to his audience with a series of old school 35mm slide shows planned for 2011 to be presented in Philadelphia and New York City. Friedman, who is often seen behind a lumbering, antique reflex camera, has been shooting vintage-style portraits at various events since 2005. The project became Tsirkus Fotografika in 2008 and currently shuttles between Philadelphia and New York city shooting at everything from animal shelter fundraisers to jazz-age events, to all-night warehouse parties.

The half-hour presentation, containing some of Tsirkus’s most memorable and intriguing images from an archive of nearly five-hundred portraits, will trace the evolution of the project and its vision from humble and accidental beginnings to its current position: that of maintaining a very busy shooting schedule, an archive website, plus planning a launch of a new public arts project in 2011 RA will also discuss his highly unorthodox photo methodology informed by his fine arts background, which involves creating mysterious, and often haunting images from the usually thrown-away instant film negatives.

RA Friedman's work was recently featured in New York Magazine. He is currently working on an artist's fellowship with The City of Philadelphia Mural Arts Project. He lives and works in his studio in the South Square neighborhood of Philadelphia.

Photo by Frank Siciliano of Steamed Punk Labs

Ot Azoy! Zut Alors! It's Alive!

Baby Boris is now fully functional and we gave him the first test run shake down. The radiant energy of the hugely powerful light source quickly heated up the test slide made on thin polyester film stock taped to a piece of window glass and started to buckle it! This was something I had not considered.

We then tried sandwiching an Estar based (Kodak trade name for the heavy polyester base they use for their sheet film) transparency between two pieces of glass with no mask. The combination of the thicker film along with the heavy glass on both sides allowed the slide to easily stay in the projector two minutes with no apparent damage and it was cool enough to handle as well. Boris stayed nice and cool at the slide stage; no problems there, although he does heat up the room.

So, the answer is the slides will need to be masked in-camera and then just trimmed into the mount which is a simple sandwich of two pieces of window glass cut to size and carefully taped on the edge. This is actually a more elegant solution and avoids a lot of gunky tape. Additionally, I may need to cycle between two projectors if I want to keep an image up a long length of time. The plot certainly thickens!

The photo is by Frank Siciliano of Steamed Punk and FPS Design. I was there while Frank was making this image. The working method was nothing less than impressive and the resulting image speaks for itself---amazing.

First Glass Test Slide

Slide #1, a true silver image on thin, archival polyester film stock, mounted with archival tape in glass. Good probably for 100+ years and Sunday 05/24 we'll plunk this into Baby Boris and see how it flies. Thanks to Elaine at Frugal Frames for the glass!