Madison Meetup 2013 (+ Big Bonus)

Ctein had lots of new work to show me. Appears to be in B&W...*

I trekked westward to the wooly wilds of Madison, Wisc., yesterday for the annual Mike-Ctein meetup. Both Ctein and Laura were in the finest of fettles...Laura was just back from Zanzibar or Kathmandu or somewhere, and appears to be utterly unfazeable by jet lag, and Ctein is getting lots of sleep lest he make mistakes in the darkroom in the last days of the grand dye project. So neither one of them had the usual haggard sleep-three-hours-a-night Sci-Fi convention sleep-dep look. He and I managed to get through half of lunch being sociable before lasering in on some intensive shoptalk.

Bye the bye, BTW and apropos of nothing, Ctein has found the camera for him. His 22" prints from OM-D files are superb. (And, yes, in color.)

A couple of Ctein's friends at the convention happened to be former photography collectors (partial to Group ƒ/64 and priced out of that market now), who turned me on to a show just down the street at the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art—in fact, we had walked right past it on our way to and from lunch.

A protest march passes MMoCA (at right).

Later, two cyclists wait for a red light at the same intersection.

It's a marvelous show...at least for me. Much from what I'm beginning to think of as "my era," and yet a lot I've never seen, at least in "real print" form; some great old favorites and some people whose work seldom gets shown. A great variety, which is important to me. And even a discovery! Who is Ida Wyman? A new name to me, but I loved her pictures in the show.

Don't judge the show on the basis of the web page, which really isn't even minimally indicative. Co-curated by Leah Kolb and Richard Axsom (a fact the web page doesn't mention). On view till September 1. The space is really nice, too, open and well lit.

(No pictures allowed in the gallery; I cheated.)

Really a pleasure. Even the museum guards were exceptionally nice! I'm an hour away from Madison, but I might actually make the drive to see "Focal Points: American Photography Since 1950" again.

And you should certainly pop in for a look if you're within a stone's throw of the place and walking past it on the way to a pasta bistro....

Mike

*[As Mike continues a running joke that only he thinks is funny]

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(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

Andreas Friedl: "Thanks for pointing us to this exhibition. I live in Madison and had no idea this exhibit was going on."

Dave in NM: "The problem with the faux filed-out negative carrier effect is that in the real world, only the outer (filed) edges would be uneven. The inner edges would have been nice and straight, like the edges of the camera's film gate...."

Mike replies: I think it's the opposite. The film gate always left a subtle signature, but the outer edge (in my prints at least) was always determined by the easel, so it was always regular and completely straight. What I miss in digital black framing lines is that the inside border is too clean. Should be more like this:

Taran: "Come on man...you can't post a Ctein photo and not give exuberant/exorbitant technical detes. What paper is he using, is he printing 16 bit pigment K3 magenta, normal sharpening routine or what?

"How am I supposed to learn?"

Mike replies: One thing from which one might learn is that despite being 103 years old*, Ctein is still taking pictures and making prints on a regular basis.

*In Venusian years. In Martian years he's only 33.

Comments

[Stan B.]

The march you saw yesterday was but a part of a world wide effort to prevent the global endangerment of our food supply by the corporate entity known as Monsanto.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/05/25/march-against-monsanto-gmo-protest_n_3336627.html

[marcin wuu]

Um, about those black "darkroom print" frames... aren't they a bit, I don't know, cheesy?

[David Aiken]

"Later, two cyclists wait for a red light at the same intersection."

I thought they would be waiting for a green light. :-)

[Jack]

I see leaves on the trees in Madison, but the protesters are wearing coats. I can see that in black and white.

[Ctein]

Dear Mike,

Personally, I'd have left in a little more of the sprocket holes.

Jest sayin'...

pax / Ctein

[Mart]

> two cyclists wait for a red light

I know cyclists don't always obey the road rules but are you sure they weren't waiting for a green light?

[Richard Alan Fox]

I am shooting M43 and Nikon D800E, printing to a 3880, forgetting peeking at the pixels a 4/3 image fits on a 17x22 sheet better than a 2/3 file.
That is a 15x20 he is holding, nice even borders all around, a 14x21 not such a nice fit.
Way to go Ctein!

[Chris]

Two cyclists waiting for a red light? Must be in never-never land. In Berkeley the bike riders just blast through the lights and stop signs.

[David Bostedo]

Sadly, you're not the only one who thinks your running joke is funny...

[Chuck Albertson]

Was the protest about soaring auction prices for Group f/64 prints?

[Dave in NM]

"I think it's the opposite."

As much as I hate to admit it (probably because it underscores how long it's been since I printed in a darkroom), you're right. I thumbed through a number of my old prints after reading your reply, and though I thought I recalled letting the outside edges of the black border die into the white margin, in just about every case, the outside of the black border was cropped by my easel blades, exactly like the example* you provided. I fiddled with a wide ragged black border on some prints, but I eventually standardized on a thin cropped black border.

Memory is not always all that persistent.

*I like that shot a lot.

[ctein]

Dear Mike,

Laura and I got to the show today and, yeah, I was pretty impressed. Two, mebbe three photos that I thought didn't really live up to the collection as a whole (e.g., a water dropletted nude on some rocks that was unoriginal at the time it was made, let alone now); a remarkably high overall quality, really.

You're right about Ida Wyman. Wow! Where'd she come from?!

Also, maybe my ignorance, but I wasn't familiar with Archie Lieberman, who was doing totally wonderful things with light.

A real treat and a overly way to wind up a trip. Tomorrow it's back into the darkroom (sigh).

pax / Ctein