Double Exposure B&W (III)
In-camera collisions on 35mm black-and-white film: neon, water lilies, freight, and the long wait at the gate.
The roll opens on freight. The back of a semi trailer, stenciled 5850, comes through with its latches and mudflaps intact, but a water lily has landed square in the middle of it, petals spread across the corrugated door like a decal nobody ordered. It sets the rule for everything that follows: the hard, lettered world of signs and machines on one pass, something soft and growing on the other, and the shutter refusing to choose between them.
Then the neon takes over. A dotted DO NOT ENTER sign floats in a circle of light over a pond of lily pads, its prohibition ringing a single blossom that clearly did not read the sign. A wire-thin neon skull grins out of a stand of trees and cloud, with the dark shaft of a tower rising through its nose like an afterthought. Both frames run on the same joke, delivered deadpan: the loudest thing in the picture is the one that isn't really there.
The last frames leave for the airport. Rows of empty lounge chairs recede toward a wall of glass, one lone figure standing at the window while a second exposure lays a faint grid over the whole room, as if the departure board had dissolved into the air. And finally the view from the seat itself: a wing and engine slicing across the tarmac, small figures busy on the horizon, all of it printed through a spread of pattern flowers, so that the airplane seems to be taxiing through wallpaper. The roll ends the way it began, machinery and blossom sharing one negative, neither one winning.
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Related
- Double Exposure B&W (I) - Layered 35mm monochrome frames that let signs, boats, branches, and stone carvings occupy the same moment.
- Double Exposure B&W (II) - Eight overlaid frames on 35mm black-and-white negative, where sacred towers, painted fish, and silhouetted riders trade places mid-roll.
- Trip to Ojisan Photo Lab Bali - One roll of 35mm color negative that follows the ride, the storefront, and the glowing rituals of an analog outpost in Bali.
- Giants Art from the Dean Collection at Virginia Museum of Fine Arts (I) - A color-negative walk through the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, from Dean Collection galleries to painted stone.
- Giants Art from the Dean Collection at Virginia Museum of Fine Arts (II) - Neon, marble, and glowing resin traded back and forth through the glass of the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts.
- MUJI Hotel and Night Street Photos, Chuo, Tokyo - One night in Chuo, Tokyo, moving from a quiet hotel room out into the city's lit-up dark.
- Night Photos — Canon Sure Shot - After-dark frames from Japan on 35mm color negative, each stamped with a date the camera made up.
- Night Street Photos - A night roll through Japan's glowing signage, lantern alleys, tagged shutters, and pure neon.
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