Black and White Fine Art Photograph by Kirk Decker
This is one of the photographs being offered through SmallEditionPrints. It was made with a “vintage” 15mm ultra wide angle lens manufactured circa 1979. While it looks like a fisheye lens, it’s actually rectilinear – straight lines stay straight. No curvy fishiness in your photos with this lens. High-tech and wildly expensive back then, considered obsolete today; it’s one of my favorite lenses. The machine in the photograph is a Carding Engine manufactured circa 1858. It revolutionized the textile industry. In 1958 a complete three story factory with nine carding engines sold for $650.00. Today the same factory is a historic landmark, Watkins Woolen Mill. Will my lens make a comeback, will it be valuable again? Don’t know, don’t care, I’m getting full value from it right now.
I had left Kansas City at 4:am and driven to the One of a Kind show in Chicago. By 8:pm I had my artist’s booth set up and my photographs on display. Walking back to the hotel, I peeked through a construction fence and saw this scene. I had brought an Epson 3880 printer with me and by 1:am I had a photograph of the scene printed, matted, and framed. A few hours later, after the show had opened, I sold the photograph to an art collector.
This photograph reminds me of The Time Machine by H.G. Wells and The Steerage by Alfred Stieglitz. The novel by Wells and the photograph by Stieglitz show a society split between people of leisure and people of labor. I love working in black and white and while the cameras that I use to create these images excel at recording the surface of things — person, flower, building — I feel the very best photographs see past the surface and become metaphors that evoke images of things unseen; love, hope, loss, struggle, change. These images that see past the surface of the thing are the images I want to make and I felt that this photograph did that.
