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Bud Grossmann’s
Words of the Week
for the Week of
April 30, 2006
Previously unpublished Philosophy
© 2006 by Bud Grossmann.
All Rights Reserved.
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Untitled, 1969
© 1969 & 1974 by Bud Grossmann
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PHOTOGRAPHIC TECHNICAL DATA
From: visitor-comment@budgrossmann.com
To: b—@juno.com
Date: 24 Apr 2006 11:24:54 -0000
Subject: From Main Comment Page
Commentor's e-mail: w—@juno.com
Re: Words of the Week
Comment: Dear Bud,
That photo sure looks like it was from Bob & Jane's wedding....
Hope all is well. Love, Bill
From: Bud Grossmann <b—@juno.com>
To: <w—@juno.com>
Date: Mon, 24 Apr 2006 18:38:26 -1000
Subject: Technical data.
No, Billy, I believe you have misidentified a photograph I recently published on my Web site.
In 1971, at Good Shepherd Lutheran Church in Honolulu, I foolishly used a newly acquired Nikkormat to shoot Jane and Bob's wedding. I had never tested the camera for flash photography. The "M" and "X" flash synchronization settings evidently were wired incorrectly, and my Kodachrome transparencies consequently were underexposed to the point of uselessness. Another photographer at the event—Lloyd Nakahara, as I recall—got some decent pictures. Jane and Bob were gracious about my disappointing performance, and I, some years later, in an autobiographical blurb accompanying a photo exhibit, made a facetious reference to the underexposed photos. Using poetic license, I joked that I had "forgotten to remove my lens cap." The story, often retold, entered the apocrypha of Great Moments of Regret in American Photography. Jane and Bob's marriage, we might note, has prospered in all these decades since.
The photo you commented on today was not underexposed; it was not exposed at all. It serves as an example of one of my early experiments in "filmless" photography. I didn't take it when you and I were classmates, college sophomores in Oakland, California.
This particular frame was not exposed in the front seat of K— G—'s '53 or '54 Mercury, parked on a dirt road at Lake Chabot on a warm, moonlit night in the spring of 1969. I used a perfectly good Rolleiflex, with no film. My able photo assistants, K— and W—, participated in choosing the camera (borrowed from the college yearbook staff), and they concurred in my decision to leave it unloaded. I can't recall whether we didn't load it with Tri-X or with a slower film. The model—a woman over the age of twenty-one who commissioned the Portraits by Moonlight—seemed more interested in the process of photography than in the results.
If you would like more information about this photograph and others that I almost took, or coulda shoulda woulda or wished I'd taken, I would refer you to my essay "On Non-Photography."
Thank you, always, Bill, for your support of my art and of my craft.
BG
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