Elephants on My Mind

I purchased this large photograph in 1984 from a high school friend. We were both in New York at the time – he was studying photography and I had a summer internship at Chemical Bank. He brought his portfolio to a lunch date at the bank’s fancy lunch room,  and I immediately loved this one. This is a hand printed photograph, measuring 20” square. For those of you who are not familiar with photography “in the olden days”, this was a much different process than the “pull out your phone and take a pic” option we all resort to nowadays.

The first step was to utilize an SLR (single lens reflex) camera with a roll of black and white film. The quality of the lens was very important, thus good photography required expensive equipment – some of the lenses could be thousands of dollars. Next, settings needed to be adjusted on the camera to consider the amount of light, the length of time for the exposure, and the focus. Once this was done, the film was developed in the dark room – lots of chemicals, absolutely NO outside light and a bit of hope that you captured the image you wanted. Once the film was shot and developed, you could not make changes to the images, as we often do now.

The next step is the printing process. A dark room is just that – completely dark. Any exposure to light will damage the film or printing, so all this work will be done under a red light. Not clear why that doesn’t affect the process, but I’m not well enough versed on the issue to explain. To print a negative, the artist must make decisions regarding the time the film is exposed to the paper, the length of time it soaks in the various baths needed to affix it, and the size of the finished work. In this case, producing a photograph that is 20” square requires equipment large enough to handle the paper.

My friend told me the photo was taken at the Bronx Zoo at the elephant enclosure. As a child, our summers included visits to Playland in Rye, NY and the Bronx Zoo. While I understand the old “cage” style of zoos was not pleasant for the animals, I loved those trips (not so much Playland as the rides made me ridiculously motion sick). The elephants were always my favorite, and this photograph brought those memories back. It also started me on my collecting “circus theme” journey, including a wonderful Calder lithograph of the circus. We will visit Calder another day!

It should be noted that my friend is a professional photographer in Maine, James R. Solomon Photography:  https://www.salomonphoto.com/