In this event presentation, Maciek Nabrdalik discusses non-traditional approaches to documentary storytelling.
For his long-term stories, Maciek usually opts for a classical documentary approach, often with black-and-white reportage.
However, he also loves to experiment with different approaches to documentary work, stretching the boundaries by learning and using new tools and techniques, both analog and digital.
Maciek shares some of his new documentary projects using these new techniques, and discusses how they were developed, executed and translated into new visual stories for publication.
TRANSCRIPT
00:00:05
[music plays]
00:00:41
David Campbell / VII Insider: So it’s great. The PhotoWings support lets us bring these events for free and put them online later. So this will be recorded and will be— Usually we get these up within about a week or so, so these resources are there for everyone to use. And as some people are seeing, we also have a new web presence. VII Insider has moved to vii-insider.org. I’ll be sending out a newsletter very soon with some more information about that.
00:01:08
Final piece of housekeeping. If you have a question as we go along, please put them in the Q&A box and we’ll leave plenty of time at the end, and I’ll moderate some of those questions for Maciek. Maciek is going to give us a presentation on how he uses non-traditional forms of storytelling in his documentary practice. So over to you Maciek.
00:01:28
Maciek Nabrdalik: Thank you, David. Welcome world, I should say. Well today I’m going to be talking, as David mentioned, about some of my experimental approaches to documentary storytelling. And it will be partly technical, partly— I’ll take you on the back, to the back door to my practice. It’s—
00:01:58
Some of the projects are not new at all. Some of them are over 10 years old. But when I was preparing for that presentation, I realized that I’ve been doing them throughout my, I would say a regular, long-term documentary project practice. And they help me keep them up, because they usually came with much faster results.
00:02:35
I graduated from computer science in Warsaw University of Technology, and when I realized quite quickly after graduation that my life path was taking me somewhere else, I think somewhere more exciting. I started to feel a bit uncomfortable with that experience. I mean, computer science. I almost felt that probably because of lack of self confidence as a photographer, I felt the lack of a formal education, and somebody was asking me what school I graduated, I was trying to hide that information. But the engineering part of my brain has been surfacing from time to time and I got to like it in my photography and I sometimes embrace it. So I’ll start with—
00:03:40
start and finish with some of those projects. But let me show you a little bit of my presentation. So we call it the “new approaches to documentary storytelling,” but I think that “experimental storytelling” would be a probably more fitting title when I started to prepare this presentation. Some of them, or I should say all of them, have a very distinct look. They— 90-percent of them, they, right away, look like they haven’t been done in a traditional way. And the aesthetic reason was almost never the reason to choose the given form. And I’ll start with one of my first experiments from my second book, called “Homesick.” It’s a book on consequences— on sociological consequences of the Chernobyl catastrophe. And I felt the need to go there for many years. Since my childhood, I should say. But I’ve been interested to go there as as a human being, more than as a photographer.
00:05:09
Mainly because over the years of my interest with that place, I’ve come to realize that so many great projects have been done there, and I wasn’t expecting any sense, any possibility, to do something worth showing. So I, you know, as I already was a photographer, I assumed that I will go there with with some kind of a filter and I got myself two toy cameras. I’m sure most of you are familiar with them, they’re called Holgas, which are very primitive plastic, built fully from plastic, 6 x 6 cameras. And they tend to leak light and yeah. They come with lots of artifacts, to say so, if you photograph with them.
00:06:08
But I wanted to use them in a slightly different way. I learned how to load them with a 35-millimeter film, so the 6 x 6 format was used only partially. But because I was using the 35-millimeter film, I could get the image exposed also on the perforated part of the of the film. And I also like the idea that the camera was very imperfect. It had like light leakage and I could, in a way, control it when I would take away tape I normally put on the camera. I could hope for some specific overexposure and I— when I talk about this project, I often bring the experience of having a dog. And it’s like you have a nice, hopefully, dog that you tamed, and you train them. And when you walk the dog without the leash you’re mostly certain that it will follow you. But sometimes they’ll go 50 meters to the left and return sometimes they’ll disappear for a second. So pretty much with that process, I was having my photography without the leash.
00:7:41
And I could— I knew where I was pointing, I knew the lens of the camera, but since it was an analog process I couldn’t see it instantly, and I was predicting it will look specific. And I think I succeeded. And during this trip I also realized that not everything I saw was photographed. And when I started coming back over the next 12 years, many times over the next 12 years, I was using very different tools, and I also came back with a regular digital camera.
00:08:26
So, that I think was the was the first attempt to use a tool that would look different. I also learned over the years, the rule that I’ll break here just to be more open about the process, that if you have a concept which tend to be a little bit out of the box or has has— yeah, let’s let’s say it’s a concept, you can use it but you shouldn’t be too open about it. You shouldn’t really tell why you decided for that or other technique, because it quite often has a chance to become too literal. And then in this case, I can tell you, that I felt the reasons for the catastrophe and the consequences of them somehow reminded me what happens on the film. And also, I felt that the film exposed this way look like it could be found. And, of course, so this look, with the place and with all the emotions coming from the place, my emotions, I felt they were going along well.
00:09:45
But the approach to the photography was identical to all my documentary projects. I would behave like a documentary photographer. I would talk to people, I would get their names, I would listen to the stories. I would report as I would for any magazine or newspaper. But the difference was with the tools. Today I will not be talking too much about the projects and my subjects themselves. I hope I’ll have a chance to talk about different projects on different occasions, but I’ll take you through the process.
00:10:36
Another I would say slightly similar approach— I had, when I was to photograph some time ago, it was pageant contest. It was Miss Trans Poland [sic] contest, beauty contest in Warsaw. And I— again, I was hoping to go document the competition, take some portraits, get some interviews of the participants. But I was thinking if there is anything that I can make different about it. I knew that there were— there’ll be different photographers documenting this.
00:11:21
And I came up with the technique— I didn’t come up with a technique, but I came up with an idea to use the technique of polaroid transfers. And so the only way in which I felt uncomfortable about the process was that the name was slightly too similar to the subject. And for some people it seemed like that’s the reason I chose it. But I didn’t choose it because of the name. But I felt that the process itself— I’m not sure if all of you are familiar with process. I’ll try to show you a little bit of it. And many things can go wrong, so please forgive me what happens. Here is a little clip done by a friend of mine when I was doing the project. It’s Krystian Bielatowicz, which was part of an interview he was doing with me back then. So I was using this 1965 Polaroid lens camera with Polaroid pack film which you’re normally supposed to expose and that’s—
00:12:42
Yeah. At room temperature you’ll wait about one minute and a half for this to develop, then you peel it off, and you’d end up with a perfectly glossy square image. Just like any Polaroid looks like, right? So I felt that by using that technique of Polaroid transfer, which is different from what I showed you by just one step. So here is the piece that— one of the sheets from the lens camera that normally you would end up exposing together.
00:13:29
It would be the fixer and the developer coming between the two, and after a minute and a half you’d peel it off and there would be a perfectly exposed picture. But in this process you would stop it much earlier. Let’s say after 30 seconds, you’d peel it off and then the negative would go against any paper or any— pretty much anything. Anything you would like to transfer the image to. And with the rubber roll, you could press it on some other surface. And today I went to my little archive and I found, actually, the originals of those.
00:14:12
So you can see that they’re obviously unique because they couldn’t be repeated. But that these were the— these were the images with lots of artifacts. So you know, again, going a little bit to the concept, which I normally wouldn’t, I would think that these these images are probably even more interesting than the polaroids themselves. And that’s pretty much what I wanted to say about my subjects, right? They don’t have to look and behave like anyone else to be who they are and be interesting. And so that’s a little bit of my Polaroid process. I’m very happy to talk about it, except this material is almost impossible to find these days. And if you find it it’s going to be very expensive because the companies that were producing the film pack stopped doing it, unfortunately. But if you have it, one of the ways of using it.
00:15:27
And here, you can see the scans of the same. Again, the short documentary reportage from the contest. And as a contest that happens over one night, I came back next year and I continued doing this. But it was a project that didn’t last years I could publish it right away. It was exhibited atone of the festivals in Greece. And yeah, quite effective way of producing a small body of work. And the text that was going with it, I was recording what they say on stage where they introduce themselves. And when they answer the typical questions during competitions like this.
00:16:38
Maciek Nabrdalik: Then I would like to tell you about— I still keep repeating this, and I— if you’ve ever heard me speaking about my work, surely said before. It may happen that I’ll now be repeating this to the end of my life. This is the most important project I’ve done so far. I’ll not go too deep in the project but it’s serious portraits of survivors from German-run Nazi concentration camps worldwide. And I was— I set out out of a need to meet those people and to talk with them.
00:17:27
The journey took me almost four years and I was traveling around the world. And I knew that i’ll be meeting them in very different settings and that was the truth. And sometimes I would meet them in a former camp site, sometimes during anniversaries, sometimes in offices that the organizations that deal with survivors have around the world, sometimes in their private homes, and sometimes on the very high floors of some skyscrapers in New York City. So I knew that life took the survivors to very different places around the world and of course they had quite successful— many of them, quite successful careers and families and all that.
00:18:18
But I wanted to talk with them about something that they would say was irreversible. Some— the influence of the experience on their life. And I knew that I would not be looking at anything that was surrounding them. Not anything in those apartments or anything in the backdrop, natural backdrop for them will be interesting. I almost felt it will be in the way. And if you see those images, I’m sure as I can assume most of you, many of you here, photograph yourself, you can think of many ways on how to achieve that kind of look. And one of the very obvious guess would be to bring black backdrop, put it behind them, have some strobes and photograph them.
00:19:20
And of course I had this idea. The problem with that was that I knew all the traveling. I wanted to travel light. But the bigger problem was that maybe equally important in that project were the recollections I was collecting. And I couldn’t imagine I’ll be talking with them or taking them back with my questions to the times of the horrible things they witnessed or what happened to them in camps and have a flash in the middle of a word or a sentence. It just didn’t feel right. I could do it in post production, but I couldn’t. Now, I was brought up as a documentary photographer. There were rules circulating around for a long time [inaudible] put them together.
00:20:26
But I felt that I could do something that would formally be alongside of those documentary photography rules, and I would still alter the reality a little bit and make them feel comfortable. So I had this idea of using— again I can show you the real, the real thing in proof. I was surprised I found it when I found them. These are my original tools, I used for them. And also the first and probably the only one: nail polish I used for my first filter. So I used the regular UV filter which I painted with the nail polish in back, so when I would put it on my camera, I would black almost everything out, except for a little piece in the middle. You see, it’s like a keyhole. So imagine this being on my camera with a little black backdrop behind my subjects.
00:21:47
And I’ll just photograph them in natural light using the black and white program on my camera with a quiet mode. And I could— I didn’t have to do many photographs, and I could do them in a way they would never notice. But the look is like a strobe. Then I would, say— sorry for the shaking of my table. Then I would use something like this, when I realized that this filter has been cutting some of the hair of my subjects, and I only needed to black out whatever they were wearing, because I didn’t also feel comfortable asking them to wear black or direct them in any way. So this would be the way my foreground would stay so that would black out anything they were wearing and I could still see their face.
00:22:40
And sometimes I would use one over another. This was plastic version I would just wrap around my lens, like this. Put it together and still photograph. So in this way I, in my camera, I did the file, as you see. As you see it. What— I could, yeah, achieve the same thing in Photoshop, but I also felt that I would like to film them. And, you know, in 2013 I didn’t even realize that I could—that I could do, that I could edit film in a way. So again, I could film them using the same: tools when they were talking and you see a piece of— example of it here.
00:23:43
But that’s Irreversible. It ended up being a book. I hope to be— to have a chance to to join, maybe see you in the book club and talk you through the book. But yeah I traveled around the world, and I met 42 of those people and it’s still the most important experience of my life as well. Not all your projects.The next one came somehow in a reverse way.
00:24:24
I’ve been working for many years on the on the subject of faith. I was born in Cz?stochowa, which has a national shrine for Mother Mary, in Poland. I was brought up in the Catholic faith and I could— I felt that I could document it as something I remembered from my childhood. [inaudible] something has been changing since then. And I’ll set off again— it was a self-assigned project for many years, I was photographing faith in a very traditional way: black and white, documentary, reportage style.
00:25:17
There were things when I was documenting this new phase of the faith where I felt that this black and white reportage doesn’t match the scenes I’m seeing. But it could partly come from lack of understanding, the need for let’s say… some kind of memorabilia connected to the faith was sold around the churches during the celebrations, and people had the need to own them and probably set them around their homes.
00:26:00
Yeah, it was something that just didn’t match the style I chose to document what I remember with. And I had another project in mind, which I picked up during one of my travels. I saw— I’m sure all of you saw once in your life, possibly participated in, let’s say, green screen photography studio, where they invite to be on the cover of Fortune magazine, or pose with someone, post, pretty much on the green background and then— And then you get the results, shortly after, when the software does the work. And I had this idea for the project, and I wanted to use it around the presidential election in the US.
00:27:02
I wanted to go around, still want to do it, by the way— and started doing different things with it. I wanted to go around and all the people that photograph with one of the candidates and, of course, then I would just use the portraits with other candidates.
00:27:24
But then John Paul II died and— John Paul II in Poland had a very specific cult, and I wanted to do a project that would somehow be complementary to what I had already photographed around faith, but I also wanted to react to the day when he was canonized. And I went to Wadowice, his hometown, with quite a unique, I would say, offer to the to the pilgrims: get a photograph with the new saint. I got a— I bought an archival photograph of John Paul II hugging someone. I don’t to recall, who was he hugging but I bought the rights to use the picture for the project.
00:28:16
And before going, I wanted to pitch it to some clients and I created this little video that I was hoping will allow me to explain it better. So the my subjects would pose against the backdrop, they would see themselves near John Paul II on my computer screen— would look obviously quite artificial, but when my camera would flash and the photograph would be recorded in the computer, it would come out quite… good enough.
00:28:56
So with this idea in mind, I went to Wadowice, and I met, I think over— for six hours before it started pouring rain in my little makeshift studio, 28 people. None of them came to make it as a joke. None of them wanted to update their Facebook profile photograph. They honestly had the need to have a photograph with the new saint. And in exchange for the photograph they would share why they wanted it. And their responses were surprisingly deep and honest. I also have a short film from another friend who lived close by Wadowice. He came over to film a little bit of the backstage of the process, maybe it will help you visualize this better. So they were posing— again, I used a dark gray background for this
00:30:13
iteration of my project with green box. And they were posing seeing themselves on my computer screen and then getting the trend. As you can see, I’m sure you can read from their faces, they take it quite seriously. But the moment when the flash fires, and that’s what they would see on the computer screen. And that’s the print they would be getting right away. And they would tell us where would they put the frame with the photograph, what would they pray for to the new saint. It was quite unique experience. And in my camera, of course, I had them posing with the invisible. In my computer I had what they wanted.
00:31:28
The thing in one day I was able, very effectively, to address the faith I couldn’t do over the years documenting it in my reportage style. And I was also able to say something about John Paul II and Poland. And sometimes in those projects the technology became a subject itself.
00:31:59 I was fascinated, really fascinated by Google Glass. As I’m sure all of you remember that announcement, promises, and the fear coming from that technology. There was a whole group of chosen individuals who are called Google Explorers, and they would get the glasses ahead of anyone else, and they would be able to test them in public spaces. And what I could get access to was to read their feedback. I mean, what was surprising to me was that the most common thing they would mention was the reactions of people who would recognize the glasses on their faces. Their reactions weren’t welcoming at all. They would
00:32:59
ask them to take the glasses off, to stop recording them, to leave the bars. There was a whole group in the US, that— a movement, that they would produce stickers, they were saying, “Stop Glassholes,” and they would put them on the doors of restaurants they didn’t want people to enter wearing those glasses.
00:33:27
As I said, I wasn’t, unfortunately, the chosen one, although there were talks along with my colleagues to whether this could possibly be useful for photographers. And I searched and I found myself three pairs. Forgive me, I will not be trying them on. I look very stupid wearing them. But—oh, maybe not so stupid as I thought.
00:33:58
So these are very cheap spy glasses, they would call them, and you could load a micro SD card in here. Maybe i’ll just switch again to my magic table. Look, so there is a micro SD card in this part. There is a battery. There is a record button here.
00:34:36
So I bought myself three pairs of those. I asked my father, who is not only an engineer like me by, by the schooling, by degree, but also he’s handy— engineer, and I asked him to help me to make the battery life longer, and one of them have remote release.
00:35:05
For another pair— You know, having all three pairs I was thinking, Where should I go with them to talk about the glasses themselves? And I went to Vegas, to Las Vegas. I I figured that first of all that’s a place where they announce the technology every year during the Consumer Electronic Show. And there was also a ceremony of the Adult Video Network.
00:35:38
So I got accreditation for that, and I— also, Vegas invites people to break social norms. With the slogan, right? So I— so I went as a journalist, as a photojournalist to the AVN Awards. But I was carrying my camera but I, rarely, I would say— I wouldn’t be using it, but I would be using my my glasses as a camera. And I think that was one of the most effective attempts to use a technology, because— When I returned, together with a known journalist Filip Springer, we— or he did an interview with me on the experience for one of the biggest Polish magazines, called Polityka. And it was followed by an interest of the Polish TV, who was doing a story on the technology itself.
00:36:44
Because the pictures were supposed to look like they weren’t supposed to be taken, I’ll just show you a few. That’s the self portrait in a mirror. That’s how I called it. And these are just spreads from the magazine. So the idea was— this is called Invisible in the Sin City. The idea was that it would look like photographs from places where you normally don’t photograph. It’s a quite soft selection, because we are broadcasting a different age group. I’m not show you know, but the idea was that people get interested. What is this? How do you photograph them? They would get into the technology itself.
00:37:40
It was— I would say what I learned from this experience was that if someone tells you that the smaller camera you have, the better for you. I would argue they are not telling the truth. In most of my practice I found the camera really opening doors, and when I didn’t have it, I was just trying to frame with my camera glasses, I ran into trouble quite a few times. And I must say I don’t blame them. That’s one, promise.
00:39:18
This is when I use the technology to test— not the technology itself, but to test something that was bothering me already for many, many years, I would say. And not only me, of course. We started talking, or the industry started talking about the presentation, and I had this personal encounter when I was covering the refugee crisis with a photographer who was pretty much explaining that he is not photographing those who come to Lesbos and jump out of the boats; they are all happy and they took selfies. Because, as he said, that’s not how the refugee looks like. And, of course— that would make anyone think, but it would make me think, in a way, that I’m possibly— I’m not admitting it, like he did, but I’m possibly half responsible for this. I photographed Chernobyl, and when I was editing the various stages, I would probably look at people who were sad, because I would assume that that’s how they should look after this event in their life.
00:39:43
So I was invited to do— invited to a wonderful project two of my friends run in Poland. It’s Monika Szewczyk-Wittek and it’s Katarzyna Sagatowska, they run a project called Portret Osobisty, and they invite four or three photographers every year to photograph strangers, pretty much. The people who want to be photographed, portrayed by them send some kind of application, they send their own portrait and they’re asked to explain why they would be— they would like to be photographed by me or another photographer. And of course I was—
00:40:25
I’m talking about it because I was invited to the second edition. But as you may realize already from that sample, or I can also show you, but all of my projects are somehow problem driven. They’re not sets of pictures and this— the only reason would be that they want to be photographed by me, which didn’t seem like enough for a project. So I had an idea to use to use this series of doubts with that opportunity, coming to test something. I wanted to see if I can portray them without assuming how they should look like, or what is the best light for them. How should I— when should I press the shutter button, when when they make a specific face or… I wanted to strip myself of all these possibilities. And I asked my girlfriend to read the applications without showing me the photographs and without telling me the names. And she read them to me and I chose seven people who didn’t mention the reason that they like my photographs. They said something else, and that seemed like an opportunity to chat and talk about something else. And I invited them to a very specific scene. It was a completely black room.
00:42:03
Technically, they would be led and put in the chair before the light would go off. When the light was off I would walk in just using thelaser pointer, so I wouldn’t see them ,they wouldn’t see me. And we would sit and talk in complete, awkward darkness. Then I would photograph them, still without seeing them. I will tell you in a second how—.I would leave, the light would go on, and they would leave. So I didn’t see them the day I met them. I talked to them usually for over an hour, sometimes longer. And then I portrayed them. I only saw them the same day, when I looked at my photographs in the computer.
00:43:03
So this is the flash I used. It’s a the flash I got years ago. It’s normally used for studio table photography back shots, where you want to [inaudible], when you are not composing one photograph from many, and you would like to have highlights. So this is a flash, as you can see, but it’s with a very high frequency. It’s a very high quality flash by Broncolor. It limits the sound as well, which allows you to count the exposure, because it’s every second and there are lots of different filters to it. So I would use the one that pretty much produces a tiny dot. So when I would set my camera on a longer exposure, when the person— when they say they were ready, and they posed the way they wanted, and I would just pretty much randomly paint over their faces, or at least I thought I’m doing that.
00:44:14
Sometimes for 30 seconds. So my camera would collect— collectively record the image, but I wouldn’t see it. And the results would look this way. I have to tell you that these were the deepest conversations I had with strangers. Honest from— and it’s not only my feeling because they were used in the documentary film about the project, and they would share my my view here. So we could right away go to things that you normally don’t talk about with with strangers. And we could find some bonding without, you know, looking at each other, reading each other’s body language, trying to match the people we know with those
00:45:15
sitting in front of us. Because sometimes there are similarities and you get some preconceptions, and I wanted to avoid that. So maybe just to finish, I can show you a little bit, a little video from the process. Again, it’s slightly different because the camera is from a different side then my view. So sometimes they see more than I would. But that’s pretty much how it looked. They just wouldn’t move for 30 seconds. And I would maybe take three, four attempts for for each person. I even met two people I knew, I knew quite well. I didn’t recognize them from the application. I also feel that we had much deeper conversations, which I’m very grateful for.
00:46:09
So that’s all for me. Thank you! I encourage you to play with photography because, besides this being a very important and interesting language to share problems we encounter, it’s also a great tool for creativity. If there any questions, David.
00:46:37
David Campbell / VII Insider: Yeah fantastic Maciek, thank you for that. Um, Paul has a couple of technical questions. I think this was in relationship to the Polaroid project. Did you process the film yourself and what was the paper you transferred the Polaroid to?
00:46:52
Maciek Nabrdalik: Um… sometimes yes, to the first question, but I also took a friend to location. It’s a long process, so, first of all, you saw my1965 Polaroid Land camera focusing, a huge flash strobe, the lens is not a portrait lens, I was using something else to make it short. I would pull the film, I would hand it to the friend who served as my assistant, and he would sometimes rolled them on the head— Epson or some other photographic print like an inkjet paper which I would transfer them to. I made so many that I ran out of the paper, so I had them on different materials. But I tried to keep them as an archive because they are unique. Just one copy. and… yeah.
00:47:57
David Campbell / VII Insider: Right there’s a question from Guillaugos, if I pronounced that correctly. I hope so. “If you had the chance to redo the project, The Irreversible, again, would you change the technique, or would you still use the UV filters with the black tape?” And if you would change it, why— I mean, why would you keep it all, or why would you change it?
00:48:17
Maciek Nabrdalik: I would say I would keep it. The only thing I would change about it, I would start 10 years earlier, if I could. I would keep it because it’s turned out to be effective. It was another attempt from something that you visualize in your head, you get a result you wanted, and you get it, as I said, without disturbing very intimate interviews. Most of them I did on my own, some of them I had a journalist traveling with me, but very few.
00:48:56
Then traveling light, being ready for unexpected situations. Sometimes I would set up set up one meeting and then he would say, or she would say, my interpreter will say, “Oh, I like talking to you, you want to visit my neighbor next door?” And so that made things easier. So I wouldn’t change. I think— I also got a compliment from the survivors, a surprising compliment, saying I managed to take them back. And I think, I think in the photographs they seem… I wouldn’t, yeah
00:49:52
David Campbell / VII Insider: Question from me. I mean, in the Strangers project, that seems to be one where you chose a technique to have a particular impact and for a particular purpose, you know, to distance yourself from them and let them kind of express themselves in their own way.
00:50:01
Are the other techniques that you’ve shown and you’ve experimented with, do you think about the same thing? Do you think about a particular technique because it’s going to have a particular impact or a particular purpose? Or is it an experimental— in other words, for the purpose of the story, or is it an experimental-driven process as well?
00:50:24
Maciek Nabrdalik: Yeah, most most often I would say it’s for the purpose of the story.
00:50:28
David Campbell / VII Insider: Yeah.
00:50:30
Maciek Nabrdalik: Sometimes it’s both. Sometimes, yeah, I mean you make this— if you come, in your life, if you come up constantly around the stories that other people before you have done, and if you wouldn’t try them your own way, you need to change job most likely.
00:50:56
Maciek Nabrdalik: But I think that most of my attempts— I didn’t show you all of them— were also successful in terms of the viewer and the subjects, and they could read more just from seeing the visuals without me being there, without me explaining— those sensitive ones could read. Not the literal attempts, but they could read my intention, certainly.
00:51:32
David Campbell / VII Insider: Yeah, yeah. Paul’s got an update on the on the technical question. Actually it was— the processing question was in relationship with the Holga film project. Did you process the Holga film? And then he asks, “How on earth did you run 35 millimeter film through a Holga?”
00:51:48
Maciek Nabrdalik: I don’t have a Holga on me. I had two of them. One was already bought from me by a collector, which was an interesting experience, also.
00:52:07
But I have a roll, which is120 film, is 6 x 6, plus 35-millimeter film. This part is easy, you just use the same roll on the back end. The only thing you need to do is you need to— in the other part of the cassette you just need to put some kind of foam on both ends, so it’s holding in place, and it works normally, as a holder. The only problem with it is that when you finish, you need to unload the film using, like a little darkroom, let’s say, like a black cloth. And you have to— it takes time. but I didn’t process the film myself. I sent it to the lab and I scanned it.
00:53:03
David Campbell / VII Insider: Right. Excellent, excellent. Okay, I think that’s— we’ve covered all the questions. I think that’s been a fantastic presentation Maciek. Lots of people have commenting in the chat and elsewhere. They’re very, very interested in all the experimental things, that it’s very inspiring to see those things, so thank you very much for presenting that. And yeah, we look forward to seeing everyone again in the next event.
00:53:28
Maciek Nabrdalik: Thank you very much. And hopefully I will see some of you at other events at VII Insider, too. Alright, thanks David.
