Fixing Shadows
In 1996 I was working as a software engineer in Silicon Valley. Engineering was a wonderful profession, but photography was more fun and so captured my free time. Those days, the World Wide Web was in its infancy. Photographs were part of the Web from its beginning and photographers were starting to use it to reach a large audience.
One day a Web-based photo gallery caught my attention. Run by David Sapir, a Professor of Anthropology at the University of Virginia, it featured portfolios of famous and unknown photographers with one thing in common: outstanding black and white images. Work was included from the great California photographer Jack Welpott, American documentary photographer Marion Post Wolcott and, surprisingly, Lewis Carroll, who had photographed when not writing about Alice. The gallery was named after a term used in the 19th century for photography: Fixing Shadows.
I had practiced photography seriously after being smitten in 1980. Soon I was processing and printing black and white photographs. I started spending my annual vacations to Bangladesh on the streets of Dhaka photographing people. In California I spent weekends teaching black and white photographic printing at University of California Berkeley’s Extension Photography Program.
One day, while looking at Fixing Shadows, an idea hit me. I sent an email to David asking if I could include my photographs of Bangladesh in the gallery. He asked to see some.
The next weekend I scanned several photographs from Bangladesh that I had taken during the ‘80s and ‘90s and sent them to David. A series of email exchanges with him followed. At the end of that I had articulated how I came about making those photographs, what they meant, their context and my background.
And so one day my group of photographs, “Discovering the Children of Bangladesh”, along with a statement and captions, joined others in Fixing Gallery.
The gallery was popular and I started receiving a steady stream of comments from viewers. Then my Bangladesh photographs showed up on a Web list called “bwtop10” that someone compiled every month. It listed the best black and white photography on the Web that month. My portfolio went “viral” and I received numerous comments and mails indicating it had touched people. I added a second portfolio and more bombardment followed.
That experience left its mark on me. I learned that to connect with my audience I must present my work with sincerity and humility. Providing the context is important.
Much water has passed under the bridge. Nowadays there are millions of web galleries and an effort like “bwtop10”, attempting to capture the best the Web has to offer, would make no sense.
But the Fixing Shadows gallery (including my portfolio) is still alive, although the fixingshadows domain name has been taken by a Chinese company offering to fix facial blemishes! You can visit www.people.virginia.edu/~ds8s to view it.
Why bring it up now? I had almost forgotten this episode, but recently a friend mentioned the gallery and connected it with me. He had seen it while a graduate student in Europe in the late 1990s. It was nice to know this effort was remembered after so many years!
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