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| © Hugh Kretschmer |
| All Ears by Hugh Kretschmer. Click photo for more images. |
All Ears was shot for a mid-year article on American music for Esquire magazine. This shot depicts a sound room, its walls covered in ears. In this case, Kretschmer determined the angle of the ears he wanted during the sketching phase, as well as the appropriate lighting, how the shadows were going to appear on the wall, and, "all the little subtleties that you can do in Photoshop easily. But all that stuff gets preplanned ahead of time the way I do it."
For the shoot, Kretschmer went to a modeling agency and surprised them with his request for "someone with a very nice ear." Kretschmer acknowledges, "Ears are funny; they're not necessarily photogenic." As the shoot was done in the middle of the year, there were some obstacles. "We photographed one ear, so she was lying down, and she had very fair skin, and when she turned over to let me photograph her other ear, it was bright red, so we had to wait a little while for the redness to subside before we could photograph her. I had to be careful not to embarrass her and make her ear go red!"
The ears were photographed on Kodak Portra NC 4x5 film, and Kretschmer made prints on Kodak N Type "C" paper. He and his team cut the prints, and mounted the photos of the ears to the wall with tacky wax. They worked from the corner outward, making sure the cutouts didn't overlap where the two walls met. Finally, he photographed the entire set with a Toyo "G45" camera and a 210mm lens on Fuji RDP III 4x5 film.
Kretschmer definitely enjoys the process. "It's really fun. For that particular shot, when everything was up on the wall, the set was dressed and lit, to pull that first Polaroid and to see how realistic it actually looks... it's very satisfying."
For Return of the Thin Man, done for Men's Health magazine, Kretschmer's approach was a little different. This time, the story was about a writer who'd lost 60 pounds, and described the dieting process from both physical and emotional standpoints.
Kretschmer made the printing process easier for himself by actually pulling the camera away from the initial shot, cutting out the Polaroids and taping them together to make sure that the size relationships were working throughout the process. He shot with a Hasselblad and an 80mm lens on Kodak Portra NC 120 film, and made prints on Kodak Portra N Type "C" paper. Finally, he made his cut outs and carefully assembled them in front of the camera. Again, he used a Toyo "G45" camera and a 210mm lens on Fuji RDP III 4x5 film.
Throughout the process, whether he's building a set or combining images, there's little room for error. Kretschmer's accurate details are what make his otherwise surreal scenes appear so plausible. And the intricate process is probably why he thinks of himself as a photo-illustrator more than anything else.
So why the commitment to a more labor intensive, manual process? "People have asked me why I don't do this in Photoshop, and I don't know if I could get this quality. Maybe someone else could; power to them if they can. But me being so sensitive to it, I'd probably be able to tell the difference. I come from a very old school. This is the way I learned and what works for me."
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