garrison beau scott

I love to haunt old thrift stores and antique shops, my main objective is old anonymous photography. It’s easy to let your imagination wander with some of the pictures and begin fabricating a story using the visual clues. Some of the photographs have some writing on them, usually though there’s only enough of it to remind those who were familiar with image of the who, what, and where. Sometimes I’ll find a photo-album and get a little more of the story behind a particular picture I like, but most of them are single and a complete mystery. Those are the ones I like the most. There’s nothing but questions and a very limited source of information to provide the answers.

There’s a great web site called Look at Me that takes submissions of found photography. At this writing, there are 616 photographs that, as they state on their site, “are without connection to the people they show, or the photographer who took them.” A very poignant thought to be sure. I think if anything, this type of collection and the effort to preserve these memories speaks to how cool humanity can be and how important we all are, or were at one point in life.

The image I’ve chosen to submit for this entry is one of my favorites that I’ve collected. With all the effort and chaos that surround the driver of the car, all he’s interested in is the pretty woman. A classic moment in time.

My Holga experiment started as a temporary solution. The camera I’d used since 2001, a twin-lens Yashica-Mat, needs to be repaired and while it’s in the shop getting re-conditioned, I decided to get a Holga to tide me over. I wanted something that would shoot 2 1/4 film and didn’t necessitate a small business loan, something cheap.

The Holga is indeed cheap. Plastic body, plastic lens, plastic shutter, plastic cheap. It has 2 shutter speeds; something like 1/100th of a second and bulb. It has 2 f/stops, sunny and overcast, though a defect in manufacturing rendered sunny the same as overcast, so really it has just one aperture, f/13ish. To advance the film after you make an exposure you have to manually wind the roll, using a window in the back of the camera to see the frame number, or you can skip the film advance and shoot multiple exposures to your heart’s content. This camera is as lo-fi as it gets, but what do you expect for 22 bucks and change?

Because it’s so cheap, the camera has spawned a multitude of modifications from Polaroid backs to custom lenses including pinhole adaptations. There’s more info at Holga Mods. You could say there’s a cult following behind the Holga. Due to the lax quality control in Hong Kong where they’re made, each camera produces slightly different results due to the inherent flaws of each camera.

Light leaks, focusing and exposure issues and the infamous vignette have turned this cheap little camera into an icon in the world of photography. No bells and no whistles, almost point and shoot in its simplicity, but enough control to allow a photographer to use what they know about the craft.

I know enough to understand photography isn’t about the camera, it’s about the photographer and the Holga, even though it has its quirks, just gets out of the way. It almost asks you to take pictures. So this little temporary solution might last a bit longer than I originally thought. At least until I break it, and maybe by then I’ll have the Yashica-Mat fixed.

While at Brooks, we often had to take photographs of people and invariably students ended up asking other students to pose for their assignment. Most of the time, the outcome wasn’t so good as photography students generally make better photographers than they do models.

But some of the photographers, no matter how inexperienced their subjects were, always came up with great results. John McKivett was one of those photographers. So when he asked me and my then girlfriend to pose for him for a project, we both eagerly agreed. The assignment was called Fondly in Love, or something like that and John wanted Heather and I to exude fond love. Or something like that. John was one of the more creative students at Brooks at the time, and I have so many dear memories of him coming up with whacky ideas and then watching him pull them off.

John died suddenly a few years ago, dropped like a stone from a heart attack at 35. I still haven’t recovered from the loss as he truly was a remarkable human being, a wonderful friend and an amazingly talented photographer. So when I was leafing through the box of prints and came across this, I thought it’d be a nice way of introducing some of you to Johnny Wrong Way. And probably the best Valentine I could give my wife.

Love those dear to you everyone, we never know how much of it’s left.

I’ve been around photography my whole life. But it wasn’t until I turned 21 that I began to seek out answers to my own questions using the camera. That was 1991. In 1996, I’d had a few semesters of photo classes at Orange Coast College and two years of intense study at Brooks Institute of Photography.

1996 was the year that the images began to provide the answers. At least to the questions I was asking. So 1996 is the year I targeted for the beginning of this retrospective and who does a 12 year retrospective? So 1996 - 2005 it is.

I’ve been extremely fortunate to have found myself in some amazing places looking at some amazing things because I was holding a camera. The first image from this collection of work pretty much defines that experience. In the winter of 2001, I left the North American Continent for the first time in my life and landed in Prague. For a week straight, all I did was walk this incredible city with my wife, trying not to shoot all my film before I made it to Budapest.

On one particular day, walking back from Troja, we entered a particularly grungy, riverside walkway that reeked like a New York subway platform. I suddenly felt my wife gone from my side and spun around to see where she was. What I saw was the scene that follows.

I set my camera on the tripod, took a meter reading, composed the shot and made sure my wife was going to stay out of the frame. It was a pretty overcast day and the light was flat and muted, but I felt there would be enough dark shadows to provide decent contrast and began to trip the shutter release cable.

In the time it took my brain to send the synapse to my thumb to press down the plunger, and for the plunger to send it’s impulse to the shutter, a pretty cool thing happened. The clouds broke, sending a shaft of light through the windows of the walkway. As soon as the shutter closed, the light was gone.

I now make it a habit to always look behind me when I walk.

Film is, and now even more so, megabytes are, cheap. So that making a mistake, or in this case, three of them, ain’t a big deal. As a beginning photographer understand that every click of the shutter that produces a mistake is one less bad picture you’ll have to take down the line. I truly believe we have a finite amount of mistakes to make as photographers, and the sooner you get them out of your system, or in this case, camera, the sooner you’re going to start making striking photographs on a consistent basis.

Starting out, I was lucky to get a good frame per week of constant shooting. Roll upon roll would get sleeved and then I’d eagerly look on the lightbox hoping against hope that there’d be a shot worth the time I had put into the effort. When a single frame showed itself to be anywhere close to good, it was cause for celebration.

It was also cause for study; What did I do right this one time? Even more important are the lessons to be learned from what I did wrong. Exposure? Composition? Developement? Selection of subject matter? Was it all bad? And what could I do to change it so that the next time I was faced with an opportunity to click the shutter I’d make the right choices and end up with something worth printing?

The most important thing is to keep shooting. Keep making mistakes, who knows, one day you might get lucky and take a really cool mistake. Or in this case three of them.