Blue Balls & Happy Accidents
Anybody who claims full responsibility for each and every one of their images may be stretching the truth a little. Most photographers have stories about their "happy accidents" and then some. I have at least a dozen stories that fall into this category, but today I want to specifically concentrate on my potato chip story. The reason here is that it exists in the overlap zone between the issue of typologies we discussed in the last blog, natural phenomena, irony/symbolism, and physical properties of objects.
Yes, there is no potato chip in the photo above, but once there was. Without it, we would see nothing but unending blue seamless with one tonal value. So how did the photo above come to pass?
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Well the story goes as follows- I had an assignment where we wanted to illustrate INDIVIDUALITY using ironic content, hence the potato chips. First we did a nine potato chip typology, and then individual "portraits" of each potato chip. Initially we did the typology, and the first individual shot, and then went to lunch. After returning from lunch, it was immediately obvious the oil in the potato chips was being absorbed into the seamless, and migrating outward. And it just kept migrating further outward for three days! Accordingly, twice a day for those three days I did top lit photos of the ever-expanding grease. What was initially a quarter inch was the size of a half dollar by day three.
While this top lit time sequence may have won me a prize in a high school science fair, the photos were less than evocative to say the least. Recently though, I had done some work where we backlit some agate, and the results were superb. The saturation and contrast of the stone shifted, and really helped create a compelling image.
So I decided to place the greasy seamless on my light table, thinking we now had had two differing levels of translucence, and the backlighting might give us a similar result to the agate, but with a more monochromatic outcome. The photo of those two spots of grease on paper is the image above. If the potato chips had not bled into the seamless, this photo would not exist. If I had not recently had the geology project, it probably would not have crossed my mind to backlight the paper. Funny how these things work out. I’m not taking any conscious responsibility for the outcome here. Sometimes you just get lucky!
