The story of the old cloth
Added 2022-12-18 19:09:51 +0000 UTCDecades ago, I think it was about 30 years ago, when I still had my photo studio in Basel, Switzerland, I sometimes took advertising assignments in addition to my everyday work (nude photographs of and for private female clients).
A company that made socks, stockings, bodies and such things for a younger female clientele had me photograph purple pieces on a large cloth they had made especially for the occasion. Purple was supposed to be the fashion colour of the coming year (and it was), but when the company presented the promotional photos to the buying departments of department stores, the colour was met with complete rejection - far too unusual, they said.
In fact, the green version, which I photographed after the fiasco with the purple pieces, made it onto the shelves. The irony of the story: purple actually became the fashion colour of the year and the green packaging and sales posters were quickly replaced by the purple ones... What stayed with me was the huge cloth, which I then used in a few sessions with models (or in one, I don't remember exactly) and decades later for the photos with Catarine.
There were no digital cameras back then. The pictures you see here were taken with a Hasselblad on colour negative film, then enlarged on paper in the lab and finally reproduced in the print shop.
Some of them, the ones shown here, I scanned a little later for my former website. With an Agfa scanner that cost me a fortune at the time and had a resolution and quality that one can only laugh about today. Of course, I didn't have a monitor that could be compared with today's (although I did have an Eizo tube model, 17 inches) and the old Windows (3.1?) ran a Photoshop version that hardly did what a filter on a mobile phone can do today.
Internet transmission was via modem and the photos I posted here were huge by the standards of the time.
Times change, but my old data does not adapt :-)
The original scans (stored on 3.5" floppy disks back then!) have not survived the many changes in technology. Some of them I had copied to CD's, a lot of them not and thus are irretrievably lost. Of the photos shown here, only the versions I published on one of my websites at the time, remain, unfortunately with the huge watermark that was considered normal at the time.
But it is a little excursion into my earlier days and I hope you enjoy the little journey through time!
