Sunday, May 11, 2014
+copy.jpg)
+copy.jpg)
Saturday, May 10, 2014
The NolaEastman Series
.jpg)
Almost every year I go to the U.S. & every time I land overseas I have a promise or if you prefer, a debt: I have to spend some time in New Orleans.
There is a word that gives a sense of all that New Orleans is: N.O.L.A.
This abbreviation, which is typical of a certain American practicality, is nothing more than the union of two acronyms: N.O. (New Orleans) & L.A. (Louisiana).
To a stranger these four pointed letters, maybe if he’s just a simple tourist who travels to New Orleans to paint the town red in the most famous Bourbon Street, they don’t mean much, for sure.
In the word N.O.L.A. there are the sense and the spirit of the town, the real town with its citizens who live & stay in the boundary lines of the small & hot-humid city of Louisiana.
In this series there are shots taken a year ago with a Nikon Fe 1978 camera body with a 20 mm fixed lens. The film is the Eastman Double-X 35 mm medium speed, 250 asa.
It differs from traditional films for general applications, such as 400 asa films of other well-known producers, that despite the fact that they have a large reliability but the result remains a substantial uniformity of the subject.
The film in this series, furthermore if used in a mode privileging the timing, provides, both in development phase of the negative & even more in the darkroom & then in the printing process, a significant differentiation of tonality of contrasts. These features are made possible by the fact that the Eastman Double-X has been conceived & used for the the cinema in order to obtain & maintain a wide depth of field, stability of the structural components of the image, making they stand out in the presence of contrasts.
Leaving aside the technical details, this series has been realized to narrate New Orleans: for this purpose, I chose the expressive vehicles of writing & photography.
You can find the life in the streets, in the endless bars in the french quarter & around the french quarter: they are places for meeting, sharing & conversation, where even a stranger can get in touch with the various souls of different communities & become what they define with an American-English term: a “local".
New Orleans is one of those towns, that with its history, its people - its strong influence of European extraction of people from France, Spain, England, Italy, Germany, Ireland, Scotland, Portugal etc. - with its traditions, its cults, with its ubiquitous overflowing music, with its contrasting colors, with the plagues over the centuries - from the battle of 1862 during the Civil War to the passage of greedy murderous mother known with the name of Katrina - with its story of ups & downs, becomes a place of the mind.
It’s a town of passage and of recovery too, also for people from Europe who want to start a new track or want to embrace the American way of life, bearing in mind that Nola is not any place on the territory of the United States: it’s more an exception, it’s an island that floats, something which stands with its own rules; it’s not comparable to the great metropolises of the East Coast, to those of the Midwest, to those of the West Coast and even less to small rural or industrial towns.
In fact it is a stratified conglomeration of those geographic parts of the United States that I just mentioned in the previous lines & of the migratory waves coming mostly from Europe.
New Orleans, Proud to call it home.
Nick
Sunday, May 4, 2014
+copy.jpg)
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)