Archive for category: Field Note

I met Kat through my camera in Joshua Tree National Park.

There was room to breathe out there, big boulders, long pockets of shade, the sky opened up wide, and Kat quietly settling herself into it all. In some frames she’s almost an afterthought in terms of scale, just a small figure against all that geology, yet I kept circling back to her. The lift of an arm. A slight twist through the shoulders. The exact way she planted her feet. Tiny choices, and suddenly she wasn’t swallowed by the stone at all.

That’s where it first clicked for me, what this woman could do.

Kat is tall… six foot two, but out there that fact stops being the headline. The photograph hangs on something else, her sense of where she is, and what she’s bringing into the space.

She can echo the line of a rock, let a gesture travel across an empty gap, or draw herself inward until she fits a tight pocket of shade. It’s never just posing beside a landscape, it’s more like the body negotiating with it. Watching her, I started paying closer attention to everything, her decisions, yes, but also the shapes around her that I’d normally rush past.

Photographing someone whose ideas arrive through motion has its own kind of joy. You put down a simple starting point, and then the next thing appears, something you didn’t know to ask for, something you couldn’t have scripted.

Kat has that in her. She’s a terrific figure model, and also simply a good, solid person. Both of those truths sit inside these sessions. The pictures carry her judgement and her inventiveness, and when I think back on making them, what rises up too is how warm it felt to work with her.

On our second session, the world tightened in.

*From our second session together.*

Here she takes that tall frame of hers and folds it down into something compact. One hand crosses to the shoulder, the head dips toward the knees, the other hand finds the floor and closes the loop. It’s all there, contained.

What I loved was how fully she could live inside a frame. Even pulled in close like this, the pose still breathes, little gaps between limbs, a curve the light can travel, a gesture that feels finished, like it knows exactly what it is.

I’d recognise that same awareness again once we brought in the chair.

The arrangement was straightforward, a lightbox overhead, an armchair, and, naturally, Kat.

I had the Hasselblad, my old friend, plus Rollei R3 shot at EI 400. This time we weren’t starved for light. Familiar gear in my hands, and someone in front of me who kept opening doors I hadn’t noticed yet.

Like a lot of my shoots, it started with a thing to play against. Kat tested the chair, tried it on like a new language, and I watched.

One moment she’d stretch upward and the whole picture would become long, almost balanced, nearly symmetrical. Then she’d turn, or shift a knee, or change where the hands landed, and the structure would loosen into something else entirely.

Her attention runs all the way down into the small, unflashy details. Kat knows what the spine can do, what shoulder blades can say, how the back becomes its own terrain. Under that top light, bone turns into line and ridge, and a tiny adjustment changes the entire surface.

I could see the movement coming, but my job was still to catch the instant that felt like the one worth keeping. That was my side of the exchange, watching through the finder, tracking her choices, answering them, then letting the shutter go.

And the next possibility usually arrived from Kat.

That’s part of what I treasure about these pictures. Her modelling isn’t decoration on top of the composition, it’s part of what builds it. Where a hand settles, how far an elbow opens, where the weight drops, those decisions matter before I ever make an exposure.

We also messed around with Rollei Ortho, orthochromatic film rated at ISO 25. I fell for what it did to her skin, it came back with this silvery polish, as if the light had been buffed into the print.

The negative and print from that stretch of the session have already been shown together. They belong here too, another return from the same experiment, Kat, the light, and the pleasure of seeing what the film decided to give us.

Over the span of these sessions, I realised how easily she could adjust to whatever space we were given. The scale swung wildly from one shoot to the next, but her attention to the pose never wavered.

Out among the rocks, a small gesture could stand up inside a huge landscape. In the studio, she could find a whole photograph within the strict edges of a chair.

And later, even the chair had taken enough of the spotlight.

This was the tail end of that shoot. Looking at it now, I can almost hear the picture speaking, plain as day:

“Alright, chair, that’s enough.”

There’s a kind of tenderness in returning to work like this. I remember the photographs I wanted, sure, but I also remember the person whose imagination made them possible. When you meet again over several sessions, it becomes a small shared history.

At our last shoot, I photographed Kat beneath a print of herself I’d made four years earlier.

In the print on the wall she’s upright, her back tall. Below it she’s folded forward, the spine catching the light. Two photographs, taken four years apart, crossing paths inside a single frame.

The image is called *Out of Reach*.

Eleven years went by between uploading it and finally giving it a home in this post. Coming back to it now pulls those sessions close again, the places, the shapes, and my quiet admiration for everything Kat brought into them.

Kat, thank you, for the inventiveness, the trust, and how much pleasure there was in working together. I could offer a beginning. You kept handing me something worth looking at.

*Photographs: Vernon Trent · Featured artist, model and collaborator: Kat*

I nudged the chair closer to the table, then backed up to see it.

Too close.

Nothing about it was “wrong.” A person could sit there without thinking, pull the chair in, lay their forearms on the tabletop. But through the lens, it all pressed together. The chair fell into line with the table too neatly, and the bit I needed, the breathing room for the picture, vanished.

So I slid it back.

From across the room she watched, calm and familiar with the routine. We’d done this before. She knew what these first minutes look like, a plain object shifting a few centimetres at a time while I try to name a feeling I can’t quite put into words.

Fredau brought her own understanding of shape and gesture to the work. I could arrange the furniture and explain the feeling I was looking for; she found ways to inhabit it that I could respond to through the camera. Sometimes I guided her. Sometimes a movement of hers gave me the next photograph.

The series grew between us. The solitude we made visible depended on the trust we already shared.

The table read as almost black. The chair, stark white. And beside them the tall basket, its stems thin and a little unruly.

I set the basket down, then gave it a small turn. A couple of loose stalks dropped and lay on the floor, and I didn’t bother to rescue them.

There’s a narrow point where things feel separate without looking abandoned. I kept walking up to it and overshooting it, then circling back again. Too near and the outlines started knotting together. Too far and the whole room looked accidental, like I hadn’t cared. What I wanted was simple to say and hard to get right, each object with enough space around it to be felt.

Maybe I was asking too much from a table and a chair.

When I finally looked up, she came over.

I tried to describe the shape I was after. She climbed onto the table, straightened for a second to find her balance, then folded forward.

Light skimmed her back. One leg slid over the edge, the foot hanging well above the floor.

I went to the camera.

All those straight lines I’d spent so long placing, and then her curve cutting through them. She took up very little of the room. Above her the wall carried on, and on, for what felt like an unfair distance.

I kept it.

I’ve never stopped wondering how an empty part of a photograph can end up feeling heavy. If you looked at the wall by itself, there was almost nothing there. Put her under it and suddenly the space had weight, as if it settled across her shoulders, ran along the tabletop, reached toward the chair without ever letting the two fully meet.

*click*

 

Afterwards she lifted her head and pushed hair off her face. I glanced down at the camera, letting a small pause land between us.

I knew I’d brought solitude into the room. That part was clear. What surprised me was how quickly I could recognise it once we started.

Working closely with someone while making pictures about distance is strange. We trusted each other. We had that easy familiarity that doesn’t need filling with talk. I could tell her where I wanted to begin, then step back and see what she offered.

Sometimes she stayed still while I looked. Other times she shifted before I’d said a word, and I caught myself following her instinct instead of my own plan.

When she pulled her knee toward her chest and looked straight into the camera, I thought that direct gaze would tip the mood into something else.

It didn’t.

Her eyes reached me. Everything around her stayed put.

I recognised that feeling from my own life, from rooms where I’ve sat answering, listening, participating, while a small private distance persisted that no one else seemed to notice. I’ve never had a clean way to describe it. Here it was, suddenly visible, something I could look at without trying to explain.

She held the position.

 

Bit by bit I felt we were moving toward the same atmosphere. I couldn’t know if it meant the same thing to her, but she seemed to understand what I was doing with the space around her, and how little it took, a slight shift of a wrist or a shoulder, for that space to feel heavier or lighter.

The solitude in the pictures didn’t come from being apart. It grew out of that closeness. We could reach it together.

We moved the chair.

With her sitting in it, the whole setup changed. The white legs made a small boundary under her, a kind of tidy enclosure. She folded inward, arms up over her head, knees drawn close. Now the basket stood behind her on the table, its stems stretching into the wall’s emptiness.

I watched the gaps.

Between her elbow and her face. Between chair and table. Under a foot, beside a hand. Each little opening changed how her body held itself together, like the picture was built from what was missing as much as what was there.

 

She turned away, then looked back over the chair.

I could see her face, the line of her spine, the strip of light running along her arm. The furniture and the shadows stayed in their own places, separate and steady. Her gaze connected us across the room, yet the distance inside the frame didn’t go anywhere.

I wanted whoever eventually looked at the finished photograph to feel that, too. To linger a moment. Maybe to recognise something of their own in the space we’d left.

 

Later she folded behind the chair’s back. Her hair spilled toward the floor. One arm hung down, fingers almost brushing it.

I waited.

The chair was bright against her, almost too bright. Its narrow wooden bars broke up her shape, and I had to follow what I could see and quietly imagine the rest.

Nothing needed adjusting.

For once I didn’t search for another angle, or wonder if the basket should rotate just a touch. The room had finally gone quiet in the way I’d been trying to make it quiet all along.

*click*

 

When she stood, I thanked her. She stretched, and the chair returned to being just a chair, empty again.

I looked through the camera one more time.

 

Everything sat close enough to reach out and touch.

And still, the distance remained.

Worldwide Pinhole Photography Day landed on Düsseldorf, so we took our cameras and wandered through the Medienhafen. The old harbour kept handing us scenes: sharp façades, odd bits jutting out, those tight gaps where buildings almost touch, and lines that kept rearranging themselves the moment you tilted your head up.

I went with the Holga 120 WPC because of the format. I wanted to see how that wide view would swallow the architecture, and what sort of version of it would come back to me once the film was developed.

Of course, there’s no viewfinder. You don’t “check,” you guess.

Three lines and a spirit level

The Holga does give you a hint, just not much. Up top there are three little marks, one aimed straight at the pinhole, two flaring out left and right. They more or less tell you what you’re getting horizontally. Up and down, though, you’re on your own.

Yes, there’s a spirit level. It can tell you if you’re straight, it can’t tell you where the building is going to end up inside the frame.

Some moments feel like moving through daylight with the confidence of someone in the dark. 🙂

Still, I’d already used this camera earlier that year in Domburg. Those negatives taught me, slowly, what the Holga “sees.” After looking at the prints, I started linking where I’d been standing to what showed up on the film, how far back was enough, what “too close” really meant.

I carried that lesson into the Medienhafen.

In a place like that, stepping back and forth to refine the framing isn’t always possible. You stand where you can stand, and from there you decide whether it fits. I thought it would, based on what the camera had shown me before.

When the film came back, it backed me up.

Fifteen seconds

Everything was on a tripod. Each frame was a fifteen-second exposure on Foma 200, shot under a solid overcast.

What I like in the results is the mix, clean architectural lines, but with the pinhole’s softer way of drawing. The steps and façades stay readable, yet the light gives the buildings a kind of weight that pulls me in beyond individual details.

Across the three views, the same place shifts shape. In one shot, the façade lifts up from the stairs as if it’s sweeping. In another, a section that sticks out creates a bright pocket of space underneath. Looking upward, the buildings pinch in, guiding your eye to a narrow slice of sky.

I didn’t want them to live separately. I wanted them together.

 

One sheet, three exposures

So I printed the triptych onto a single sheet of photographic paper.

First came a cardboard mask, cut by hand, then laid over the enlarger easel. That set the three windows and the thin gaps between them. With each negative, I shifted the easel carefully so the next exposure landed exactly where it was supposed to.

That placement had to stay steady the whole time. One small bump, a tiny accidental slide of the mask or the easel, and the alignment could be ruined after part of the sheet was already exposed.

Every panel got the same printing time.

When I print each image on its own, the tones match nicely. On the shared sheet, the middle photo keeps a brighter patch toward the centre-right. I was fine with it. The scale still holds, and the triptych still reads the way I wanted.

There were also plain practical limits. While swapping negatives and nudging the easel into position, the paper sat under the safelight. Safelight isn’t magic, it still runs out of “safe” if you leave paper under it too long, and fog starts creeping in.

And once the alignment felt right, I didn’t want to keep touching things. Every extra adjustment is another chance to move the one thing you absolutely need to stay put.

The mask was simple. Getting three exposures onto one sheet without drifting took attention.

Looking at the whole

What mattered most wasn’t any single frame, it was how the three sat together on the finished sheet.

Those narrow white breaks keep each view separate, but the repeated lines carry your eye across the set. The bigger margin at the bottom gives the arrangement a bit of breathing room. And that small tonal difference in the middle panel doesn’t interrupt the relationship for me.

Making it came down to two kinds of judgement. Out in the harbour, I trusted what earlier Holga photos had taught me about framing without a viewfinder. Back in the darkroom, I worked carefully enough to put the three prints on one sheet, then stepped back and decided whether it all held the feeling I was after.

It did.

 

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*Making notes: Düsseldorf Medienhafen, photographed during a Worldwide Pinhole Photography Day walk. Holga 120 WPC, Foma 200, tripod, fifteen-second exposures. Triptych printed as three separate exposures onto one sheet of AGFA MCC photographic paper, using a handmade cardboard mask, same exposure time for each panel. Moersch SE4 Dev and Moersch Variotoner *