Archives – July 28, 2023
I was visiting with friends last weekend and talking with their 17-year-old daughter when she mentioned she had 77,000 pictures on her iPhone. 77,000 pictures! If you talk with digital natives, you will find they casually make enormous numbers of pictures, far more than we ever did.
It’s always been the case that seasoned photographers made more pictures than they showed. In a world of prints only the most perfect one belonged on the wall. But the single image always excludes everything outside its field of view. At best it infers the world past its borders but it doesn’t show it. Now though, with the abundance and limitless storage of digital displays, we become free to add additional nuance or variation to a story, begging the question, what can we do with it? Well, what if we put these alternate views together so that when taken as a whole, they become more than the sum of their parts?
At 83, Bob Primes has spent a lifetime shooting movies. Now with that behind him, he continues to make new and beautiful moving pictures using stills which he combines into slide shows. Not for money he says, “…the works on this site were created mainly to preserve my sanity. I hope with all my heart that you enjoy them.”
The pictures here are from a project called Pas de Deux. The pictures were made using two cameras mounted closely together, one shooting at normal shutter speeds to freeze the dancers and another shooting at slow shutter speeds to create blurred images of them. After shooting he combined the two images, partially layering one over the other to make frozen but flowing pictures – which became the basis for this slide show. Primes shot Pas de Deux on Salt Spring Island in Canada, He recruited a friend, dancer Lolla Davindisch, who recruited her friend dancer Robbyn Scott. Bob brought the two-camera rig, they brought some costume changes and everyone improvised. The results are remarkable and beautiful.
Primes effortless mastery of his craft is in part the result of forty plus years changing like a chameleon for each new project. The work of the cinematographer is always to serve the needs of someone else’s story, not stamp it with their own style but Bob doesn’t have to think about pleasing others now, only himself, and he is doing it by making these slide shows.
We don’t usually talk about slide shows here. Our interest is the single framed print. But just this once, click the link below and spend a few minutes watching one lovely image after another appear on your screen. See pictures made only to satisfy desire – without commercial consideration or a need to fit into what is current. See the work of a mature artist free to express himself as he wishes; making work where individual images are joined together to become more. Let’s take a look at the slide shows of Bob Primes and the pictures they are made from : Pas de Deux
Andy Romanoff
More slide Shows – https://www.bobprimes.com/slide-shows
Website – https://www.bobprimes.com/
Andy Romanoff – new book – Stories I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You
Photo website https://andyromanoff.zenfolio.com/
