Sidewalk Electrophotography Portraits
Hey y’all. Last weekend we set up the old Xerox Camera No. 4 on our mini deck out front.
Xerox Camera No. 4 System on our front deck
Mabel then invited people to sign up for 15-minute time slots to come stand for a socially-distanced portrait session.
I was missing many of our friends in Catskill, so I knew that having them over was going to be fun.
I also knew that I was going to share JPGs of the portraits gratis, no matter what. But what to do with the prints?
Early that morning, Mabel and decided to offer the prints as a gift if someone wanted to donate $50 to the Catskill Mutual Aid group. Mabel volunteers with them and works on the micro-farm and sanitizers projects (just to name two…).
That buoyed our feelings–I felt great that the art would contribute to good local cause.
Rear view of the 11x14 view camera on a 6’ focusing fail
I was happy to see that the scheduling worked out well. We spaced out the appointments so that people wouldn’t gather (gotta keep us all safe!).
So.. on to the art and process! read more about Electrophotography here.
Test image
Turns out the toner I purchased has an opposite charge.
What’s that mean? Well for the layperson, every image that day came out as a “negative”. Meaning light areas were dark and vice versa. Sometimes interesting, but somewhat vexing when I was expecting to deliver portraits that looked normal :-)
All the images you see here were photographed with a 150mm Irirx Macro lens on an art production setup in my studio, then reversed in Lightroom and lightly edited.
We’ll have it sorted and have the right polarity on our toner next time.
But the process is fun. And signups were rapid, so we expanded the session from two hours to four and-a-half.
Here are some of the results.
Want to be part of the next Pop-In Sidewalk Portraits? Great. Be sure to sign up for my mailing list here.
More about the Catskill Mutual Aid group:
“Please feel free to contact us to make a donation to continue our initiatives like the community micro-farm, face mask distribution, sanitizing spray making and distribution, CMA Relief Kitchen, pantry shuttle program for our underserved neighbors with no walking access to food, as well as supporting the organizations we work with such as Columbia County Sanctuary Movement (https://www.sanctuarycolumbiacounty.org/), and Masks 4 People (https://masks4people.net/).
We have commenced work on the micro-farm and we hope to get enough compost and starts going immediately that we will be able to harvest fruits and vegetables yet this year as the need for fresh produce among our underserved neighbors is so great, now more than ever. Your donations can really help at this crucial time for us and our colleagues that we support, that in turn support our communities.”
Read more, join up or donate:
catskillmutualaid.org
In the meantime, I look forward to doing more (analog!) manipulation of the images prior to fusing. That means brushing, smudging and zapping the loose carbon on the paper’s surface before melting it with heat.
Cool, right?
Until next time… (air) hugs.
© Alon Koppel - a playful portrait by photographer and friend Alon, from his COVID-19 social distancing photo documenting project
