Psychometry Reading

Carol Golemboski
Stereoscope
Silver Gelatin Print

This spring Carol exhibited her Psychometry series at the Rowe Arts Gallery, and taking the chance to attend the accompanying lecture with the opening, I was able to receive insight as to her methodology and inspiration for some of the images. After browsing the works, I became drawn to the various objects depicted in her images. Some were teeth, some were hands, some were photograms of small animals, and towards the back along with the later parts of her series, I saw stereoscopes being used in her images. I had a chat with the curator about the novelty of these items and how to photograph for their use. It was neat to see Carol reference this object, as a lot of her scenes depicted common novelty items.

Working with a Hasselblad 2-1/4, Carol gave account to how hard it was for her to begin scratching the negatives. For anyone that works with film, you know that the negative is all you have to revert back to.  If a print becomes botched, it can be redone, but if a negative becomes scratched, it requires reshooting altogether. After overcoming this feat, she felt liberated to make the marks become part of her methodology. The scratches were done intuitively based upon the image itself, often in conjunction with the shapes of the subjects themselves and sometimes expressive in nature matching the overall feel for the image. It often created a vignette for the picture plane. 

Most all her works were printed at 20x20 square format, with exception to her earlier works. For this print in particular, I felt as though it were in motion, as though these enchantments were being spun around the object, conveying the sense of a seance. Carol was interested in the popular superstitions attributed to her found objects, and for many of them, the objects selected were associated with varying points in her life. For a stereoscope, people were fooled by the appearance of a multidimensional space depicted in a 2-Dimensional picture plane. The lure of this image is still playing on the age-old hype of darkroom magic.

Retouch Extravanganza!

So given the recent assignment to retouch our professors face, I was inspired by the constant sighting of him with his son to do a bit of a tribute to how we look up to our fathers.


I think that sons are inspired by the tracks their fathers have made, and seek to push out further into the wild frontier than their predecessors. To boldly go where no man has gone before.


Happening to occur on the 50 year anniversary of Yuri Gagarin's voyage into space, it serves to be an example of what a contemporary frontier man might look to be.

Delinquents at Work

Collection of images as a pre-shoot for the final project at Jackson Training Center, Concord NC.

This series came from the abandoned dormitory residences found leading up to the main parlor house which is to be our primary shooting location. It wasn't easy for us to be in these spaces all the time, but after awhile they became familiar to us. Still, the most unsettled feelings came from within the residence buildings. It wasn't hard to imagine what life was like there, minus the personalities of the administration, because most of the structures were still intact. Of course, observing things in color was one way of viewing it, but I had no idea what the level of eeriness would be until after I had developed the b/w images.  

Considering the lives of patients there, and even under a heavy dose of mind-numbing medication, you wonder what level of scared and hopelessness one might've felt if they were a residence in this place. There is hardly a sense for freedom and a return to things normal. 

Being a delinquent means a lot of things, but I would describe it as being wild or untamed and independent, free from societal control. To have that spirit ripped away from someone and fed drugs to suppress those inhibitions must've been excruciating to all parts of the mind, body and spirit.

Visiting the residencies first helped us to become aware of our shooting location. Getting the insiders account to life in the Jackson Training Center as first a resident would better us in developing the narrative for our final shoot. Hopefully, the persons and places involved will then register in the final images. From that we could see a story unfold like none other, because it is our imagination teamed up with the preconceived notions we developed go hand in hand.  

Delinquents in a sense that we will reconstruct what we believe to have happened there and not take from it the press release version of how things we're conducted.

Film: Kodak Tmax 100 ISO

Camera: 120 format holga

( Mar-Apr / 2011 )