My friend Eric took these gelatin silver photographs of me a couple days ago. He has a set up to develop them built into a suitcase so that it's portable but we did it in his apartment. The photographs are on 4x5 glass plates and are even more crisp and clear than these scans. Also, the dark parts on the scans are actually clear on the glass plates, the scans are done with a black background. The light parts on these scans look dark when the plate is held up to light and the image is then negative.
The photographs have to be developed within a few minutes of the plate being exposed and the images slowly appear on the plate, cloudy at first but within a few minutes they clear up a lot.
To prepare the plates he starts with some egg white glue on the edges to keep the image from peeling away later. He then puts on a layer of a combination of cotton and ether to help the silver stick to the plate. Next, the silver is put on inside a dark box because this is the light sensitive chemical. The camera he uses is from the 70's and is about a 1' cube, though it can expand more since it has bellows. Once the plate is exposed he pours the developer on by hand and then stops the development with water. The whole process takes about 15 minutes. The boomerang shaped hole in the second image is a place that didn't get any of the cotton-ether bonding agent so the light sensitive chemicals didn't stick.
The texture of my skin in the images is because the silver shows some of the ultra-violet spectrum that is invisible to the human eye so you can see under the first layer of skin.
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Adventure Club #2 went to Staten Island's Sea View Hospital which is in the middle of the Staten Island Greenbelt that Erik and I visited last month. My co-adventurists this time were Eric (not Erik!) and Valentina who were both carrying film cameras with light meters and manual focus so their pictures will probably turn out better than mine did. It was a rare sandal weather December day so we took advantage of that and went the long way through "Blood Root Valley" which was great since it's almost far enough away from anything to feel like you're in a real forest.
There are about 10 abandoned buildings which are all eerily similar. Inside there was a lot of debris and rotting away ceilings. The buildings were brick and seemed to be pretty old but there were certain things like a concrete staircase that we thought had to be from the 50's or 60's. I've read that this part of the hospital was used until the 70's so maybe they were renovated right before they were closed.
One of the coolest things that we found was a big pile of metal trash outside of one of the buildings. It was interesting to see how well a lot of it had held up being outside for who knows how long.
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A couple weeks ago my friend Allison and I went out to Flatbush to check out the houses where my grandparents grew up and try to find some graves at Holy Cross Cemetary. We found the houses pretty easily, on the left is my Grandma's house on Beverly Road and on the right is the building my Grandpa lived in on New York Avenue.
Next we went down the street to the cemetery. When we told them we were looking for somebody with an Irish name from the 30's or 40's they said we might be there a while but we were able to find some likely candidates pretty quickly. However! When we got to the grave-spot there was nothing there but a tree. The person who was supposed to be buried there is John Drum my great-great-great(?) grandfather.
The neighborhood has changed a lot since the 40's, it's mostly West Indian now, we went to a local supermarket and I got some hot sauce for my hot sauce collection. Tomorrow I'll post some more pictures from my adventure last week to Staten Island!
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A couple days before Thanksgiving I saw some Persimmons in one of the grocery stores across Queens Blvd near the library. I had been trying to think of something interesting to make to bring to the potluck Thanksgiving that Lesley and I were going to go to at our friend Maggie's house.
I went home and investigated Persimmon pie and it turns out that the internet recipe community is pretty split between two versions. The first I call "Pumpkin Pie Style" where the persimmons are pureed, the filling has milk and eggs in it, and there is no top crust. The second, "Apple Pie Style" uses sliced persimmon, sugar, corn starch and lemon juice in the filling.
I decided to make a Pumpkin Pie Style Persimmon Pie for the "Wendsgiving" dinner I was going to at my friend Brendan and Jennette's house and an Apple Pie Style Persimmon Pie for real Thanksgiving at Maggie's house because I could make that one vegan.
Both turned out great although I didn't end up with enough filling for the Apple Style Pie (I used 4 persimmons for each pie but I should have used more for that one).
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