My Grandfather's (Missing) Land Camera



When I was at my mother’s place last December, I found some more photographs that were taken with my grandfather’s Land camera, back in the fifties and early sixties.  There is a quality to the images that result from this device that I find particularly haunting.  It has to do with the immediacy and singularity of the image thus produced.  They remind me of Daguerreotypes; but I believe I’ve mentioned so before.

 

 



The first eight images here were shot by my grandfather, Kenneth Gibson, with his camera.  Most of them were taken before I was born.  These pictures include a photo of a car overturned in a flooded stream; my mother and her mother walking towards some parked cars in a driveway following a family gathering; my father’s mother standing at her kitchen door; my father smiling at my brother, Curt, in my mother’s lap; another photo of my father with my brother's early attempt at walking; Curt, again in my mother's arms, this time in front of her parents' house in Vernon; my grandmother, Marion Gibson, visited by her estranged brother, Leslie, and their sister, Ruth; and my parents with a two year old me. Then there's a botched photo of my grandpa Gibson on horseback taken by someone less familiar with the camera's workings. 

 

 

 

 

 

Next there’s one of my older brother, my younger sister and me taken either by my grandfather or my mother's cousin in Summerville.  The next two were shot by me, perhaps ten years later, with my Polaroid Swinger.  These show the Christmas tree shortly after the camera’s unwrapping, and my sister holding a leaf from a castor bean plant.  

 

The last four were, again, shot by me, ten years ago, but with a Land camera, similar to the one that belonged to my grandfather, which I purchased at a garage sale.  Sadly its lens is nowhere near as good as the one on my grandfather's model.  The first shows my friend, Roberto Pacheco standing in the striped light and shadow from the venetian blinds in my room; the second is of my boyfriend, Ne Oo, standing in front of the statue celebrating McKinley's assassination in the Panhandle Park; one of  me doing an old dance move, and finally a picture of a train entering a station shot off the television.  After my uncle Kenneth died I tried to locate his dad’s camera that I was told was in his possession, but it was either well hidden or disappeared.  I'm hoping that it was given to my cousin Jeff, who also has an interest in photography, and that I was simply lied to in order to avoid conflict.  I hate to think of it sitting in a closet somewhere going unused or sold for much less than it was worth at a flea market.

 

At the Southern Rim in Tusayan

 

 

A little over a week ago we were standing on the edge of a gigantic hole in the Earth, looking at the many layers the Colorado River managed to cut through and expose to view over millions of years, enjoying each others company.  I brought along my good old 120mm Rolleicord in order to make use of the handsome figures of my friends within this overused setting.  I was hoping I might employ them all in something other than the typical tourist shots.  I hope I managed to do so.  It certainly helped being there with two people whose upbringing didn’t prepare them to take it in an acquisitively spectacular fashion.

 

 

Jack Smith's Sunday Night Models

Clearly these are all photographs by Jack Smith from the period in the late fifties and early sixties when he was holding Sunday night posing sessions in his backroom Hyperbole Photography Studio, and just as clearly one can see by their varying degrees of resolution that I've gathered them here from a wide variety of sources available on the Internet.  I did so that they may be viewed together as a group.  I wish that they were all equally good prints of these great photos, but of course they're not.  Still, there can be no question of the great skill and inspiration that was required for their initial arrangement and shooting.

Among the many models who participated in these regularly scheduled orgies of highfalutin artistic expression one must take particular note of the contributions of Marian Zazeela, Mario Montez, Francis Francine, Jerry Sims, Irving Rosenthal, Arnold Rockwood, Naomi Levine, Ronald Tavel, Joel Markman, and Reese Haire.  The last named I'm not at all familiar with and may have misspelled, but felt it necessary to include since he was so identified (by the merchant who was selling the print) as a central figure in one of the loveliest and least seen of the pictures above.  It's the third one down and it seems can now only be seen through one of my posts a couple of weeks ago on the Tumblr version of this blog.  Images come and go so quickly around here.