These pictures are from last spring and summer, taken with my 6x7, out of various car windows. Shooting with the 6x7 is very different than my large format, and I can also use the 400 speed film I used to shoot on. (Fuji NPH 400, by the way, which, I guess, is commonly held to be complete crap.) The advantage of the rangefinder is that obviously I can make a lot of pictures much more quickly and cheaply, and I can to a lot of things that aren't easy with the field camera, at the loss of picture detail. So these pictures are take from cars, which give them a bit of a blurry, impressionistic mood. I'm not completely into these pictures, but I'll be printing a few more of them while it's still cold out.
Yesterday, I went out with my friend Akilesh and shot along the New Jersey turnpike, at the factories and other highway things along the side of the road. We'll see how they turn out. New Jersey looks just about right, since for some reason the turnpike likes to put its industry right next to the road.
Oh, the reason I started picking these car window images out of the old 6x7 contact sheets are that recently I was given a copy of Raghubir Singh's A Way into India, which is a great book based on the Ambassador, the car that's sort of India's equivalent of the VW Beetle in Mexico or the Citroen in China, basically the cheapest and most easily repaired local car. Also, the recent Todd Hido book Roaming, was inspiring as well, with his use of dirty car windows to create an impressionistic picture that still does a great job of evoking that feeling of riding shotgun and staring out the window on a shitty midwest afternoon.
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