Men in the Mountains

Digital prints made from found black and white film negatives, c.1930s

Blue coloured prints on A2 cotton rag paper 

These photographs, made by unknown photographers, come from a collection of negatives found in a folder purchased at a Sydney weekend market in the 1980s. There were no accompanying prints and nothing to hint at who these men were.

My versions of the negatives have been printed in blue in imitation of the cyanotype process, an iron based, light-sensitive formula developed in the early 1840s – at the inception of photography. Cyanotype was never a very popular commercial process but it has had its moments as it was a cheap, easy chemical solution for an amateur to both make and use. It has been used  to mass-produce (blue) photographic postcards. 

The photographs appear to have been taken by four men who shared a simple box camera to picture each other enjoying an excursion into the Blue Mountains, west of Sydney, in the mid 1930s. The men, dressed in suits and ties, took a picnic with them on this lovely warm sunny day on which they visited the natural sights of Katoomba and Wentworth Falls.

These photographs demonstrate the effect that the camera seems to have on its users and human subjects and it is evident that the men enthusiastically engaged with, and preformed for this dumb device. The men look directly at the camera and strike various self-confident poses, clearly enjoying both being photographed and taking photographs as they play with the camera’s facility to frame its subjects.

The negatives show a variety of common ‘amateur’ ‘faults’: such as double exposures, exposure difficulties in low light which created a silhouette reminiscent of a Surrealist painting, to solarization resulting from (briefly) exposing film to light during processing among other unintended outcomes resulting in often curious images. These amateur ‘mistakes’, however, add to the charm of the photographs.