Shooting in the upper neighorhood of Manhattan, between 1980 and 1986, I ended up in Washington Heights. I began to experiment with something new. I would rewind the 35mm film to what I thought (and hoped) was one frame, and continue shooting in a random, unplanned pattern using the same one-frame rewind technique. I subsequently decided to shoot an entire roll of film and rewind it to where I could put it back in the camera and continue shooting.
I took a few of these rolls on a trip to Europe – re-loaded them and continued to shoot in the same random way. The typical tourist destinations like the Tate Museum, Versailles and Tuileries were fertile ground. The results were often remarkable and at least somewhat strange and intriguing. This series includes the photographs where the juxtapositions simply came together in a somewhat magical way. Was it luck? Was it good fortune? Was it serendipity, or was it unplanned abstract photography?
Elliott Kaufman
