BIG BIRTHDAY SNAPSHOTS

I have always been fascinated with this event that my long-time friend, Andrew Keeley-Yonda, orchestrated in Madison, Wisconsin in the late ‘90s where he set up a camera at his birthday party and took pictures of everybody as the night went on. A photo booth, I guess. I hosted a birthday party for myself in 2019, and decided to enact this concept using 4x5-inch black & white film and my Calumet view camera. A couple things motivated the making of this exhibit.

The first is that I wanted to sharpen my skills in portrait technology and lighting. The second is the concept: I was going after images that had a hard-punch-flash feel to them, like the billions of horrible cheap-flash photos taken at bars by people documenting their friends with alcohol, an image that stands in for “this is what fun looks like.” I wanted an aesthetic reminiscent of this bar-party feel, but with professional lighting equipment, crisp, rich negatives, and enormous prints (51 x 42 inches). I also didn’t want the fun to be staged, like a smile turned on and a glass held up, but rather wanted moments of ease and conversation with me, the photographer and birthday celebrant.

PROCESS

This project may seem simple enough, as it’s infused with a 2019 innocence that’s harder to find since the arrival of Covid-19 and the racial justice uprising we’ve experienced in 2020. Nonetheless, it was a lot of work to put this all together, all the details like lighting technology, film acquisition, darkroom work, scanning, digital image editing, 44-inch roll printing, installing, pricing, exhibition planning, and finally archival storage. Here are some images from some of those processes.