Large Format Photography Australia

Gelatin-silver photograph on Agfa VC FB photographic paper, image size 24.7cm X 19.3cm,
from a 8x10 Kodak Tmax 400 negative exposed in a Tachihara 810HD field view camera fitted with a Fujinon-W 300mm f5.6 lens.

A truly brave and cheerful friend of mine the day after her surgical facelift. She said the surgeon used 800 tiny blue nylon stitches to hold his work together against the forces of swelling and bruising.

What an absolutely amazing revelation of just how little hard data we need to read and connect empathetically with our kindred and kind. Such a tale of inner veracity there is in a comparison of the hand gestures; especially given that the brave and generous sitter quite possibly has no visual reference that might prompt shielding such an unencumbered statement of absolute truth.
This image will be a fucus for meditation and contemplation for some time to come. Lovely.

Thanks Walter for your sympathetic analysis. Empathy was the main motivator for this picture. The brave sitter left her patient wrist band on but insisted on the bandage over the two blackest eyes in Australia; didn't want to look like a panda.

On the subject of the eyes, I think that key elememt that shifts this image from merely "clinical documentation" to "visual statement" is the incorporation of the two pen marks approximating pupils. For the sitter's sake, I hope the pressure of the pen was was on a bench top prios to applying the bandage, and not directly onto the super-sensitive peepers. BRAVO to the sitter for her dedication to the artistic expression Maris had to make!!

Walter, what an extraordinary reading: "two pen marks approximating pupils". I never thought of that most evocative implication. The truth is more prosaic. The "pupils" are actually little eye-holes cut out of the crepe bandage.

Thanks for the clarificarion, Maris. Nevertheless they do contribute significantly to the visually to the narrative for mr becuse without the the motif becomes a mummy (no offence). The need to see iis a signifier of life. Again harking back to my notion of the power of minimal visual clues. I fing this a truly wonderful image where the perfect description of the lens shows not only 'the thing itself; but also what else it can be. A bit of an exho, in a strange way perhaps, f Minor White?