Dalton Rooney

Photograph by Dalton Rooney

Photograph by Dalton Rooney

Photograph by Dalton Rooney

I am quite happy with the way these Polaroid photographs from the last couple of months have been coming out. The addition of color, compared to the black and white I usually shoot, feels light and easy; the freedom of using a handheld camera again is something else altogether. When I look back to a couple of years ago, taking pictures on these exact same streets, I am pretty amazed. I’ve been taking this same route to work for years now, but I feel like I’m seeing everything just a bit differently these days.

Photograph by Dalton Rooney

When I was four or five, my grandparents moved into a new house in Joshua Tree, California. Shortly after they moved in, they discovered that the previous owner, who had built the house, had died at home just a year before.

Needless to say, as soon as they found that out, all kinds of weird shit started happening. I should have mentioned at the beginning of this story that everyone in my family is completely mental.

Guests would remark on the strange noises they heard during the night. Someone insisted that they had seen the reflection of a face in the china cabinet in the dining room. Of course, this being the seventies, I wouldn’t be surprised if they were all high as a kite on goofballs, but still, it was enough to put a chill into my four-year-old heart. And then, the weirdest thing of all happened; something that is still a complete mystery to me to this day.

My grandparents had a big group of people over for Thanksgiving dinner. Just as the meal was about to be served, my grandmother pulled out her Polaroid camera. Everyone leaned in and she snapped a picture of us at the table, and then, as the photograph developed, she gasped. There was a glowing white face, with bright red eyes, reflected in the glass of the china cabinet behind us.

I am getting goosebumps on my arms as I type this. My grandparents still have the picture, somewhere in storage. I don’t believe much in “paranormal phenomena”, but that picture gives me the heebie-jeebies to this day.

Truth is a funny thing. At this point, most of us are sophisticated enough to know that even a straight photograph doesn’t do much more than resemble the truth of the event it portrays. By the time an image has been filtered through the photographer’s eye, the camera’s lens, onto the film and back out into the world, even the simplest subjects have been filled with an awful lot of meaning. And yet, that unsophisticated family photograph—surely it must have been some strange kind of glare from the flash? or a practical joke played on us all by my grandfather?—has a tremendously deep meaning to me. It captures an important time in my childhood. It tells me something very specific about my family. So, whether or not that photograph holds any universal truth about the existence of ghosts, it certainly holds a great deal of personal truth for me.

Photograph by Dalton Rooney

People insist that I will like dancing if I just give it a try. Or cilantro. “How could anyone hate cilantro?”, they ask. I say, at 31 years old, there are a few things I do know: I don’t like to dance, I don’t like cilantro, and I prefer to photograph landscapes. So this is what you get when a landscape photographer takes a self portrait.

Photograph by Dalton Rooney

Photograph by Dalton Rooney

The SX-70 gave me a lot of trouble today. Weird mechanical glitches caused a lot of over-exposed and blurry frames. At one point, it jammed and then spat three pieces of film at me all at the same time, all unexposed. I guess that’s what I get for buying a 30 year old camera on eBay for 20 bucks. I’m on the lookout for a spare.

While we’re on the subject of Polaroid, I came across this post today about a fellow who took a Polaroid every day for almost 20 years, right up until the day he died in 1997. There are 6,697 photographs in all, and it makes for a poignant and beautiful story.

Photograph by Dalton Rooney

This photograph is pretty decent from a technical perspective. It’s well exposed and everything is in focus. The composition is classically pleasing and there is a nice sense of light in the image. And I absolutely hate it.

“picturesque |ˌpik ch əˈresk|
adjective
visually attractive, esp. in a quaint or pretty style : the picturesque covered bridges of New England.”

At this point, I have a pretty good sense of how to use my camera. I know how to pull a composition together. But this photograph honestly belongs in a kiosk at the mall. I have no use for picturesque.

I guess it’s good to know what you don’t like, though, right? I feel like the more pictures I take, the closer I am to figuring out what I am actually looking for. I am trying to create a world, and within that world, a series of stories. I think it’s fine if that world is a bit romantic and exaggerated; that’s part of the point. But it’s dangerous to get too carried away with those elements and forget about the other things about my photographs that excite me. A landscape needs to be a little bit mysterious, maybe even scary. There need to be hints as to the reasons why the landscape is the way it is. And there need to be questions that remain unanswered.

In this case, I feel like I’ve wandered into a hidden valley in the English countryside and I’m about to be introduced to a bunch of magical faeries. Ugh.

Photograph by Dalton Rooney

I was taking this photograph in a somewhat out-of-the-way spot in Central Park yesterday when a tourist with a point-and-shoot digicam walked by. He saw me setting up my shot, stood right next to me, pointed his camera right where mine was pointed, snapped a pic, checked his LCD, and walked away without ever saying a word. While it’s entirely possible that he might have spotted this exact scene had I not been there, I suspect that he saw me with my fancy pants camera and assumed that I knew what I was doing. I would love to see how that shot came out for him.

I mentioned a few days ago that Robert Frank was to speak at the Walter Reade Theater on May 15th to celebrate the 50th anniversary of The Americans. I was not able to attend, but WNYC has the audio from the Q&A. It sounds like the interviewer wasn’t great, but the audience had a good time. I am downloading it now so I can listen to it while I develop film tonight.

I already have my copy of The Americans on order, it should arrive any day now. I am really looking forward to it, it sounds like this will be the definitive edition of our time.

I have one slightly embarrassing personal anecdote to mention about Robert Frank. Early on in my very first photography class, the professor showed a slideshow of her personal work. I’ll be honest, I wasn’t really into it. At one point, she flipped to a particularly bad photo and off-handedly said, “Oh, this is when I was in my “Robert Frank” phase.” By association I assumed that Robert Frank was lousy too, and chose not to look any further into his work. Boy, was I wrong.

Photograph by Dalton Rooney

I find that giving the house a really good cleaning is a great way to push back those feelings of mortality for a little while.

Thanks to Rachel at Shoot The Blog, my humble website has seen a huge upswing in traffic over the last 24 hours. Aww shucks, I’m blushing.

If you’re new here, I’d love for you to stay and take a look around. If you’re just looking for some pictures, I’ve got a gallery of my favorite current work, as well as a link to all of the photographs I’ve posted to this blog, ever.

I’ve already gotten several queries about my technical process; rather than rehash those emails here, I thought I would create a brief new page with some details about the equipment I use and how I use it. I’m also working on a series of posts called “Taking a Picture” that goes over some of my technical and conceptual processes.

A few people have also asked about prints… I used to have a web store, but it is offline for the moment. If there is anything that you like, just use the contact form to get in touch.

If you’ve ever been frustrated with the clone stamp or the spot healing brush for removing dust and scratches from scanned film (both tools distort grain and destroy details), you may want to give this technique a try. This tutorial is optimized for black and white film, but it works well for color, too.

Some details will be hard to see if you watch the embedded version. This video was recorded and edited in HD, so if you click through, you’ll get the whole picture. Any feedback on this post is welcome, I haven’t done many of these and would like to know if they’re helpful.