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Curtis Hendricks

DamnPhotoArtist

Photo Art* & Small Literature**
* Computer-based art that uses a photograph as a base
** Short Prose

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Off Season

8/4/2019

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Picture
My local options for processing black and white film, so far as I know them, are gone.

It can still be done, of course. Walk a roll of black and white film into Walgreens or Wal-Mart or Target and there’s a square right on the envelope identifying the contents as black and white film. It takes two weeks to process, and negatives will not be returned. Again – they keep the negatives. No. Not acceptable. Options here in this community were already gone, so I started taking them to the Columbia branch of a St. Louis area photo store. It closed a year ago. Next closest branch was an hour+ further down the road in Chesterfield. That was OK – gave me an excuse to take out the family. It closed six months ago. They were down to their ‘superstore’ over on Olive Blvd. Dropped a couple rolls off a couple weeks ago – they very kindly had it processed and returned to me via the U.S Postal Service, negatives and all. Two more days go by and the superstore closed too, a victim of the declining retail sector. So far as I can tell, the entirety of Mid-Missouri and metro St. Louis are without a photography store; wanna buy something go on-line.

Look, I don’t shoot much at all in film; maybe a half dozen rolls annually, and likely less. It’s a nostalgic act – film-based images give me fewer options as a photo artist. But it’s a nostalgic act I happen to enjoy.

Eventually I’ll get around to digging up a new provider – there’s GOT to be someplace that will handle this stuff within reasonable driving distance, and if there’s not one that satisfies me, anything can be had on-line. But for now, and for posts over the next couple weeks. I’m going to fixate on the place I started: black and white photography taken with my Dad’s 1960 Agfa fixed-lens rangefinder camera. A little mini festival of a fading technology.

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    Curtis Hendricks

    All my life I have had to learn to do things differently. To see the world differently.

    Art attracted me from the beginning. Almost every home in the tiny farming village where I grew up had DaVinci’s ‘Last Supper’ on the wall. I would come across modern abstract art in magazines and be absolutely fascinated by the colors and techniques.

    But there were no artists in my village. No one understood what modern art was. Or why it was. But there was an appreciation for photography.

    I began shooting with a 1960 model Agfa rangefinder fixed-lens 35mm camera and learned to use darkroom techniques to finish my work. Graduating to a single lens reflex camera I worked primarily with Kodachrome. Digital photography opened a new world. The computer became the artboard I never had; the darkroom I could never afford. I discovered there would never be a camera or a lens that could capture what I saw in my head – that, I had to learn to create on my own.

    I use the photograph the same way a painter uses a charcoal sketch – as a starting place. I squeeze out the unseen hiding between the pixels; the angels, the demons of my own imagination.

    ​Light. Color. Darkness. Perspective. Introversion. Mystery. Love.

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