“Soft summer light drifts over the subjects in Joel Meyerowitz’s Provincetown portraits. It smooths over dunes, waves, ocean-kissed curls, and downy bodies, creating a dreamy allure. In Meyorowitz’s scenes, mostly taken throughout the 1980s, residents and travelers stand on the boardwalk or recline in the sand. Behind them, the clapboard homes and wooden fences typical of New England architecture serve as quaint backdrops….”
Commentary
I was musing about the many joys of making portrait photographs with large format analog cameras this morning after reading Fuji Rumor’s report that one or both Fujifilm X-H2 cameras will be equipped with a 40 megapixel APS-C sensor.
Meanwhile Fujifilm recently announced its GFX50S II 50 megapixel large format large format sensor.
A mere ten megapixels between them, and several thousand dollars.
One of my greatest pleasures during the golden age of Australian magazine and newspaper photography was making portraits in colour or heavily chemically-toned monochrome for full page reproduction.
I had only seen a small set of Joel Meyerowitz’s Provincetown 8″x10″ colour portraits by then but the directness and intimacy with which photographer worked with subject stayed with me and was a reminder of how powerful portrait photography could be.
After buying my first 4″x5″ sheet film field camera from Zone VI Studios in the 1980s the advantages of large format became confirmed, so my kit complete with camera, wooden tripod, film holders, Zone VI Studios-modified Pentax Spotmeter and insulated white shoulder bag became my default for portraiture then and later even when I was jumping in and out of taxi cabs and Sydney CBD skyscrapers for no more than 15 minutes with each sitter.
The same outfit was used to make a portrait of Princess Diana for a premature babies charity though those images were spiked when one of her scandals ensued
Its been too long since those commissions and my personal portraiture and the pandemic has postponed a long-planned portrait project until who knows when it will be safe again?
What gear would I use nowadays to even just approach the special sort of relationship a big wooden camera on a big wooden tripod helped create between photographer and subject?
Large format, according to Fujifilm, is no longer an 8″x10″ or 4″x5″ sheet film camera but a Fujifilm GFX series hand camera with in-body stabilization and that will produce a rather different relationship and image, I suspect.
Perhaps that will be like the difference between a formal portrait sitting with all the paraphernalia and performance art of large format analog photography, and a dance between two equals with one carrying camera in hand.
Whether that camera has an APS-C or a “large format” sensor, it will surely produce very different results to analog.
Links
- Artsy – Joel Meyerowitz’s Photos of 1980s Provincetown Capture a Bohemian Paradise
- Fuji Rumors – BREAKING: Fujifilm X-H2 Coming 2022 with 40 (not 43) Megapixel Sensor
- Joel Meyerowitz – Instagram
- Joel Meyerowitz – website
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