Martijn van Exel

Photography

Kinkerstraat, Amsterdam, 1992.

I lived in this neighborhood at the time. I don't remember exactly why I was there at that particular time—probably waiting for the tram after class or getting some groceries. It must have been a "spur of the moment get out my camera" thing; I always carried my camera around to capture moments in time and space like this one. To capture the feeling of the city to me, at that particular moment.

I had access to a print lab, I was always experimenting with chemicals and timings and pushing and pulling. I loved dramatic, high contrast prints at the time, as you can see. It's obvious that I didn't take proper care of this print, it's all scratched. I think this was just poor handling in the lab.

There's absolutely nothing that can ever replace the analog process. It starts with having to be real selective about what you shoot, a roll of film with 36 exposures was around $5 at the time, more than a rounding error for a college kid. I shot b/w mostly, Tri-X 400 for this kind of hard contrast grainy work and Ilford HP5 for a mellower result. I had only one camera body though (Nikon FA), so it was just luck that I had Kodak loaded that day.

Then developing, I usually had this done because I didn't like the finicky work of opening up the cartridge and handling the film in complete darkness. Also this part of the process is not where you unleash most of your creativity, that's before (shooting) and after (printing). I did do some experiments with cross-processing E6 film with some freaky results.

The print process, that was the second most fun (after shooting). What you would do in Lightroom or Photoshop today: deciding what your contrast going to be, exposure, over- and underexposing parts of the scene. But just like with the shooting itself there's no immediate feedback. Expose the paper, develop, stop and rinse baths, dry, then take it out into daylight and write what you would have wanted different in your notebook, go back in and repeat. And the paper was not cheap either. This is how I ended up with an endless amount of negatives and slides that I only ever got contact prints of.. It will take me my entire retirement to go through all those. But here's one that I was pretty happy with at the time and I still am. If only I could find the negative...