Posted: December 20

Photographs on the wall

On Wednesday I hope the three photographs will be framed. The three large black and white prints come from my unpublished book project of a photo essay on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. I did the photos while I was living there and working at the Jesuit Conference; we were close enough that I could easily drop down to the Mall at all times of year and get images of the monuments themselves that create the symbolism of the Mall as well as the wide range of activities that happen in the space defined by the monuments.

My family despairs of seeing photographs that I have taken; and I can’t blame them. Most of my images end up buried in boxes out of sight. The search for the right moment and the pleasure of taking the picture seem at times more important than the final result. And before digital photography, you had to wait to develop the film before you saw anything anyway. And you had to look at the negative to see what you would get. So the photograph in my mind’s eye has always been more important in a way than the one on the wall.

With the monuments project, there are hundreds of rolls of film that I have shot; I have made 8 by 10 inch prints so I could do some preliminary editing, but I have not made big enlargements. So the three that I made for the Pied Beauty art show at Rockhurst College in Kansas City were a wonderful surprise for me. They look terrific. I sent twelve images to the curators and they picked three: a mother and daughter sitting on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, motorcycles near the Lincoln Memorial after the Rolling Thunder ride on Veterans Day and an illegal protest against an earlier threat to bomb Iraq. I had the prints done at Luigi Carnevali’s photo lab in Rome, one of the real old-time, craftsman places that only does black and white. Photos of Federico Fellini and movie stars from that era decorate the walls of the office. Luigi and his son in law, Carmello, do wonderful work. As much as I look digital photography, these images make me realize that there will be a place for fine-art photography. I shot the whole book in Ilford’s Delta black and white film; it has incredible tone and fine grain.

The three prints are being mounted at a shop in Florida by a neighbor of my sister. They take as much pride in their work as Sig. Carnvevali did in his. All the materials are museum quality and will be done in a quiet, understated way. I can’t wait to see the images. My mind’s eye is pretty good, but the finished prints should be even better.