You can Google film drying cabinets – they are EXPENSIVE. So I went hunting for a simple idea to create a cost effective solution.

To make my film drying cabinet I cut four large squares from the end of a disused roll of dog fencing wire from our back yard. I used the excess wire at each join to connect the structure together. This formed a stable wire tube frame. I then joined a smaller section of the fencing wire across the top and bottom of the tube – this will give me somewhere to hang my rubber band & top peg. The 120 film will hang from that peg with a second peg at the bottom of the film to keep it straight.

I needed to cut out a door large enough that I wouldn’t scratch the unwound wet roll of film as it entered or was removed from the cabinet. So I used wire cutters to remove all but the top and bottom rectangles in a vertical line and taped over all joins and wire ends to further ensure that my negatives would survive.

A photograph should give you an idea – the red tape covers joins along the back of the wire tube where the coil was brought together; black tape was used on the top and bottom joins; and, yellow, green and blue tape was used around the front entry doorway.

I can sit a small heavy ceramic plate inside the wire structure to prevent pooling of the drips. The outer covering is a full length cream coloured breathable wedding dress bag with a zipper (costing $15). I used black tape to cover the coat hanger opening in the top of the bag as an effective seal against dust.

For a total cost of approximately $25 this affords me everything that I need for drying my film in a dust free environment overnight. The design’s lightness offers me the ability to take the drying cabinet into the processing area where I can hang the wet negatives and seal it away from dust. Then I can move the safely enclosed film negatives into my office to dry overnight.

For storage it’s imperative to prevent dust accumulating on the tape and frame so they should be kept zipped inside the cover when not in use. Similarly, it is advisable that you store the cabinet and outer bag under an old sheet to prevent the breathable cover accumulating unwanted layers of dust that could enter your film processing environment.

It just goes to show that you don’t need to invest upward of $600 to achieve results in a non-commercial environment.

Diane Arbus (1923-1971) was definitely a photographer’s photographer. I absolutely love Norman Mailer’s 1971 quote: “Giving a camera to Diane Arbus is like putting a live grenade in the hands of a child.” She was the photographer who focused on the freaks and described them as people who had “already passed their test in life.” She wrote “They’re aristocrats.”

Of course, these were through the times in the United States where there were the so-called “Ugly Laws”… intended to stop freaks from going into cafes and diners and public places. They were laws intended to get the disturbing off the street so society could fool itself that normalcy was somehow normal. So, while viewing Diane Arbus’ work, I can’t avoid the conscious echo that super-imposed on her images are the footprints of a society that was beating these people down.

And Diane Arbus, of course, was a disturbed soul in her own right. She committed suicide in 1971 in her 40s… relatively young.

Her work is blunt. Her photographs are a surviving document of the flaws and the differences between human beings through the facilitating perspective of an empathic communicator. In Diane Arbus: An Aperture Monograph, printed in 1972 (a year after her death), the reader is exposed to a selected array of her work in the spirit of the values and ideals that she held through her life. The iconic “Child with a hand grenade in Central Park, NYC 1962″; “Tattooed man at a carnival, Md 1970″; and, “A young [black] man and his pregnant [white] wife in Washington Square Park, NYC 1965″.

While we may make photographs as observers, documenters or collaborators there are certain truths that constrain the resulting artifacts. The photographer chooses what to include or omit from photographs. The photographer selects the correct exposure, the angles and the light. The photographer brings an inevitable bundle of political and social belief systems into the selection and creation of the subject matter.

Looking through the eyes of Diane Arbus is to inhale a social comment about humanity. Why do we ostracise the different? Why are we mesmerised by twins and triplets, or nudists or transvestites?

This is an incredible body of work and nobody would argue that Diane Arbus was anything but a master of her craft and an influence for future generations.

Paul Strand (1990-1976) was an American modernist photographer with a career spanning well over half a century. His work included the first intentionally made abstraction photographs, the first photograph of a part of a mechanical device as a purely aesthetic image, landscapes, architecture and candid portraits of everyday people. One of the most fascinating things about Strand is also the influence of artists like Picasso and Cézanne on what he was trying to achieve with his camera.

Reading Paul Strand: a Retrospective Monograph, the Years 1915-1946, published in 1971 as a hardcover, is something like dipping your big toe into a warm pool and then slowly submersing yourself further on every read through its pages. On first browse there appeared to be less to these images than I had imagined. However, Strand’s photography is deceptively simple, something very difficult to achieve. And it’s important to realise that these photographs were experiments and excursions in a two-dimensional visual world unlike our modern image-intensive iPhone enabled contemporary society. In that sense, it’s important to slow down and appreciate the black and white photographs for what they were in their context of time and space. In one sense, they are aesthetically beautiful images in their own right. In another, they represent the expression and evolution of artistic ideas.

Alfred Stieglitz thought enough of Paul Strand to include him in his Camera Work magazine in 1917 and exhibited Strand at 291, formerly known as Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession, located on Fifth Avenue in New York. Stieglitz wrote:

New picture makers happen every day, not only in photography but also painting. New picture makers are notoriously nothing but imitators of the accepted: the best of them imitators of, possibly at one time, original workers… [Strand's] work is pure. It is direct. It does not rely on tricks of process.Alfred Stieglitz

This retrospective of Strand’s work from 1915- 1946 covers only half of his career as a photographer. However, from abstractions to portraits to landscapes there is a strong sense of discoverability within his photographs that compelled me read and re-read this book a half dozen times in succession. Strand was a master of drama in the understated… a man who pushed photography toward art… a creator of deceptively simple images – attributes that I definitely admire.

The important thing for photographers to take away from Paul Strand’s work is that our ideas and perspectives as “new picture makers” come from somewhere. In many cases, they can be traced back to Strand. When you take an aesthetic photograph of a printing press roller… when you break perspective with a fence… when you take abstract photographs of light on contrasting surfaces… there is Strand.

This is an important piece of knowledge for every photographer. Ideas are currency and it’s important to understand the economy of ideas if you hope one day to produce original ideas rather than just pretty pictures.

“I had plans, man,” says the little voice in the back of my head. “I was going to spend the summer nailing down the details of the Neill-Fraser case by scouring and cross-referencing her trial transcripts. Perhaps some interviews. Only I never did receive those transcripts to scour… and, well, one thing led to another and I stopped leaving the house (again) and kept putting off shooting photographs because the light wasn’t perfect.”

That me, the little voice in the back of my head with excuses, is a total bastard to live with, too. You probably have no idea. Or maybe you do. Maybe you’re also a sucker for waking up at 6.30am only to check emails, RSS feeds and scour your Twitter stream. And, hey, I know that in the real world none of this electronic social bullshit matters… but I get sucked into it way too easily.

And I’m a sucker for watching films… so subscribing to a DVD mail service is probably like a junkie picking up a casual ounce of brown heroin. I’m a brown heroin pig with an addiction to film. Foreign cinema. Science fiction. Thriller. Brown stained teeth from drinking good quality coffee from a stovetop espresso maker.

So here I am in my last six weeks of the Christmas holiday. I’m dreading another year at university studying post-graduate journalism. Both cameras sit behind me on a shelf primed for action. Rarely used.

At least, rarely used in the context of my expectation. But then… when you’re shooting with a DSLR I’m not sure 1,000 or 2,000 images in a given day is doing anything more than exploiting the technology. I’m not sure being a Flickr bitch is any more effective than becoming a member of any group or gang – pressure towards consensus and conformity, for example. I’m not sure poking my camera into a stranger’s business is even that challenging.

More recently, I prefer to slow down… I’m thinking about the light a lot more… and it’s not enough for me to grab pretty pictures, clean or otherwise. I’m thinking more about ways to achieve a long-term project.

But there is a seething core in me that knows the truth. I’ve procrastinated away at least two thirds of my Christmas holiday. I haven’t achieved any significant work, I haven’t been taking the cameras out… and I haven’t been in optimal physical or mental condition as a result.

The little voice in my head has spent the Summer hitting me up with excuses. He’d prefer to drink booze and watch movies. The bastard.

Carleton Watkins (1829-1916) travelled from New York State to California as a young man alongside his slightly older family friend Collis Huntington. After some time in the West, Watkins took up a temporary position in a daguerreotypy studio and from that moment had found his calling… he would be a photographer.

Watkins had a mammoth camera made by a cabinetmaker to take 18 inch by 22 inch glass negatives and headed on the long and arduous trek to Yosemite where he produced mammoth plate photographs that were received with some acclaim. Although, the best of these Yosemite photographs were produced in the 1860s, while in his 30s as a more accomplished expert in the field. He went on to record much of the development of the West Coast including the gold rush and the ever-expanding railroads.

Watkins also produced a large number of stereoscopic photographic views through his career using a stereo camera, popular in the mid-to-late 1800s, and employed techniques like panorama and ‘putting a framed photograph on a wall’ that were quite novel.

So why have you probably not heard of Carleton Watkins? After all, he was the photographic rival to Edweard Muybridge. His friend Collis Huntington was to be one of the big four Robber Barons of the 19th Century railroads alongside Leland Stanford, Mark Hopkins and Charles Crocker.

The answer is probably that Carleton Watkins left little evidence of his thinking behind in written words to share for posterity.

But he was also, in the end, a victim of fate. On the morning of 18 April, 1906 Carleton Watkins woke to the San Francisco earthquake and a studio where a lifetime work lay in broken glass plates and burning business records. He was approaching 70 and had just arranged for his life’s work to be bought by Stanford University. The post-earthquake fire deleted that work like a blunt force trauma. A half century of work. Gone.

It wasn’t until the 1960s and 1970s that interest in Watkins resurfaced. Remember, he took those Yosemite photographs some 80 years before Ansel Adams trod the timbers into that same park to create his iconic images.

The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art produced Carleton Watkins: The Art of Perception by Douglas R. Nickel as an exhibition book. It not only covers Watkins mammoth plate photographs but includes a large number of other stereoscope, panorama and card photographs.

I think if you take the time to look at the work of Carleton Watkins you’ll be amazed at the quality and detail of those photographs. In the mid-to-late 1800s photography was barely out of its cage and Watkins produced what could be described as perfect landscapes. They were technical masterpieces. Created under extreme difficulty and carried home precariously on the backs of mules.

It makes clear that photography is a medium that started out with perfection and seems to have been met by compromises in every direction. They already had it back in the day, right there.

My Norwegian grandfather was a photographer born in 1870 and he jumped ship in Australia at 19 years of age. He was a photojournalist and portrait photographer and my particular interest is in a set of 100 glass negatives and his wooden large format camera found by a local farmer in a King Island barn several decades ago. Knowing the gem he had in his possession, being an avid photographer, the farmer donated the items to the King Island Museum where several negatives and the camera are on permanent display. Several years later, they were exhibited for a fortnight at the Launceston Museum.

The glass negatives were taken on King Island from 1900 to 1910 and are significant because the island was only opened for farming in 1880 so Kittles’ captured many historic moments (including the first car on the island).

So this is how I see the project at this point. Imagine an ball of hemp twine unwound across space and time. My grandfather holds one end and I the other. My objective is to wind that ball back upon itself over and over in successive layers. Because it’s just too easy for me to look at Kittles’ photographs and imagine that I understand their context… the meaning of photographs changes as culture and society change around them. I need to understand what it meant for Kittles and why he did what he did.

The funding issue aside (and that I will need to visit King Island over the next few years several times) it seems like the place to start is right here with me. My life and context in 2012 is as relevant to the photographic journey as discovering Kittles’ context a century ago.

To that end I have slowly begun exploring several avenues. The first is self-portraiture and I will expand this year into general portraiture. The second, and I have to confess to being less than prolific, is the introduction of analogue film photography (or slow photography) with a Zenza Bronica ETRS medium format camera. I’m too poor for a Hasselblad but if anybody wants to donate one to a project feel free to contact me.

Even better would be a large format camera and dark room equipment. And funding.

I should also acknowledge that Brett Drinkwater at Tashosting provides web hosting services on the King Island Project website for free. The white-site design and building was done by me.

John Szarkowski (1925-2007) was Director of Photography at New York’s Museum of Modern Art from 1962-1991 and during that period put together Looking at Photographs: 100 Pictures from the Collection of The Museum of Modern Art. This collection of images, published in 1973, accounted for a mere one per cent of MOMAs photography collection including work from the mid 1800s through to the early 1970s.

Each photographer is only represented by a single photograph in this book regardless of their standing or the number of images acquired by MOMA. Also, each photograph is accompanied by a short essay written by Szarkowski on the adjacent page. Each photograph is a black and white. The accompanying essays range from a historic understanding of each image through to discussion about its conception, execution and interpretation that places it into a context beyond a mere picture on the wall. It is important to know who made a photograph, why they thought it was important and how it contributed to the spider-web lineage of photographic geneology.

Szarkowski goes to great lengths to explain another way of seeing photographs. As he reminds the reader, often photographs can misrepresent a situation as much by what is left out as what is included. So knowing a photograph is much more than standing in front of a wall and making a subjective thumbs-up or thumbs-down about aesthetic beauty. A photograph also changes in meaning over time as culture and society change around it.

For example, Robert Doisneau’s photograph At the Cafe, Chez Fraysse, Rue de Seine, Paris, 1958 on pages 172-173 depicts an older man and a younger woman at the bar with wine glasses in front of them. The man is leaning on the bar with his left elbow. The woman faces forward, only part way through her first glass. In Szarkowski’s 1973 interpretation of this photograph he writes of the power between a man and woman in a pseudo-sexual dance, of sorts. In fact, even I found this interpretation offensive given we are now in 2011. This photograph, 50+ years after being made and 40 years after Szarkowski’s interpretation, now reflects a dirty old man, very sleazy, pushing drinks on the young woman who is thinking – “How do I get out of this situation?”

I know that too often I see photographs, particularly in Internet communities that I avoid like the plague, merely judged on sharpness, technical expertise and aesthetic contribution. As an amateur photographer interested in another way of viewing the world I find that perspective slightly repugnant. Give me instead a meaningful moment to step inside the photographer’s mind.

By far my favourite aspect of this book (and why I will eventually acquire a copy for my bookshelf) are those essays that make Looking at Photographs: 100 Pictures from the Collection of the Museum of Modern Art a perfect coffee table book. It’s so easy to pick it up and fall to a random photograph with a one to a three minute read. The value of this coffee table style seems to have been lost in recent years.

Because where else would I be more engrossed in all of this than laying on my sofa waiting for inspiration? This book is a gem.

Jeff Carter (1928-2010) left behind an archive of around 55,000 film negatives that spanned a 50 year career as he worked and travelled through the back-lots of Australia. His photographs are of ordinary working class Australians from the cities to the country and along the coastline. Jeff Carter’s letterhead read “photographer for the poor and unknown”, wrote Robert McFarlane in a Sydney Morning Herald obituary on November 6, 2010.

Jeff Carter was a writer and photojournalist with contributions to leading magazines like Women’s Weekly, Pix, People and National Geographic. For a time he was the editor of Outdoors and Fishing. He was also Australia’s best documentary photographer of his generation although there are more simple truths secreted in his photographs than mere cultural records of the day. There is humour, compassion and a hell of a lot of plain and ordinary beauty.

When you read Jeff Carter Retrospective from New Holland Publishers it’s hard not to think of that later iconic Australian with a camera, Rennie Ellis (1940-2003). Although it seems Carter chose the low road and Ellis the high; Carter the ordinary rural Australian and Ellis the contemporary rock stars and urban cultures of his era. Yet for their differences in social surroundings their photography shows a shared Australian documentary genus that seems to link them. Rennie Ellis’ No Standing Only Dancing reflects the bright lights and aspirations of another facet of Australian history and is well worth a read if you can find a copy.

Jeff Carter Retrospective includes a selection of photographs spanning from 1960 over the next 50 years and is split into five sections. ‘The Big Smoke’ looks at Australian urban life transitioning out of the 1950s into the 1960s. ‘Beach Culture’ records our cultural relationship with the expansive Australian coastline. ‘Properly True’ moves inland to the expansive hard country and the people who made it their home through the 1950s to the present day. ‘Men and Women of Australia’ are deceptively simple portraits of ordinary and extraordinary Australians. And ‘The Next Wave’ includes a selection of Australia’s children.

This book, first published in 2005, was republished for the Beach Bush and Battlers exhibition at State Library of New South Wales that was held in early 2011.

The camera nests in the upturned palm of my right hand as I walk down Murray Street toward the wharf area.

Each photograph taken is an investment in time and money. The $12 roll of film provides 15 potential photographs and the cost rises to around $18 when I process the negatives in my bathroom (notice I’ve ignored the capital outlay of a developer tank, darkroom bag and supporting articles like a camera tripod and light meter).

Shooting medium format film on a 30 year old camera is what I call slow photography. It’s about getting photography under my fingertips and challenges me to say that I am a photographer. An amateur photographer. One who creates photographs for the love of doing so.

The process of shooting with a Zenza Bronica ETRS, or any old film camera that only operates in manual and requires a light meter, is critical. It’s easy to get excited by the subject and forget to focus or realise after the shutter clicked that you changed the FStop but not the shutter speed. So it’s about slowing down. Creating. Understanding the elements of the photograph before the camera stops time and immortalises the subject.

I see an interesting subject and investigate. I walk around the immediate area looking at the light and assessing the opportunity. It is sometimes about angle and perspective but more often it becomes about what to include or exclude from the photograph. I ask whether it’s an honest framing that depicts the subject in context. I hold the camera to my eye from several vantage points and assess the best shot.

Because the best shot is the one that I’m willing to pay for in time and money. Each shot is one less that remains on the film. Each shot is a lost opportunity cost for something I won’t be able to capture later in the morning. I need to make each photograph count on the film roll and it’s something that I consciously work on with a nagging persistence.

I consult the light meter by entering the ISO value and move to the desired FStop to identify the required shutter speed. If I haven’t carried a tripod it’s time for some negotiation. I might take the risk or decide to move on for a safer option.

I decide to shoot the photograph and write a short note into my book – the date, ISO, Fstop and shutter speed with a note on the conditions and the number on the film roll to review after processing the film. The feedback loop in analogue photography can be days, weeks or months. Never minutes.

The black brick is a Zenza Bronica ETRS with a 75mm lens that requires physical proximity of the photographer. I set the values and adjust the focus ring until the central focus inside the lens matches the surrounding frame in the viewfinder. I take a breath and consider the horizontal level and the finer detail of the edges of the photograph. My right hand fingers gently turn the ribbed shutter button around to the active state. And I tentatively press. To stop time. To shrink space. To suck a part of the essence of whatever it was that I saw in the moment through that 75mm lens, into that darkened box and onto a single frame of fifteen on the 120 roll film.

The vision through the Bronica’s lens goes black as the mirror inside the camera box goes THWACK.

I lower the camera to the length of its strap around my neck and extrude the arcane handle on the right side. I lock the shutter button and wind the Bronica’s quiet gears for three quarters of an intimate curve that progresses the next frame on the 120 roll of film.

I move away with the happy anticipation that I may have captured a butterfly in my magic light box. Fourteen more photographs on the roll.

Bill Brandt (1904-1983) was a master photographer – a photojournalist, a documentary photographer, he shot portraits of famous identities, explored nudes through distortion and made some beautiful landscapes. Born in Hamburg to an English father and German mother, both with Russian blood in their veins, Brandt spent a number of years in a Swiss sanitorium recovering from tuberculosis. In his early twenties, having recovered, he left for Vienna where a social opportunity afforded him the chance to photograph Ezra Pound… who then introduced him to Man Ray. He moved to Paris and worked in Man Ray’s studio for three months.

At some point in the Paris experience Brandt decided to document life in England and it’s with that work that he opens Shadow of Light. The book is a selection by Bill Brandt of photographs across his career. His dark images of society at all class levels… the England now lost… conjures up a grubbier time. While several are gorgeous beyond their documentary intent, I am repeatedly drawn back to Brandt’s portraits and landscapes.

The portaits are interesting because of their dark contrast, sometimes surreal, often somewhat sinister – plate 77: J. B. Priestly and plate 95: Jaques Lartigue. There is a contemplative Franco Zeffirelli on pate 81 and a worried Pablo Picasso on plate 93. His portraiture style isn’t easily confused with other photographers. It is gritty, dark and bold. And some of the landscapes are simply inspiring works of art.

I should confess that my predilection for Brandt’s photography means I can’t give a non-biased opinion of his work or books. If you haven’t been exposed to Brandt’s photography you should open yourself to the experience. He had an incredible eye. He was also a master of that black and white, almost austerity, that I imagine when I look at scenes. It’s hard to describe. But it’s like a Brandt is darker than the darkest dark. It’s like he has coal under his fingernails. It’s like the surrealist in him opens another doorway to his eyes that changes the world in some almost fractional manner.