Shooting the Midway
By Megan • Dec 10th, 2007 • Category: News for Creatives (archives)Aimee Baldridge reports for Pop Photo:
For flight attendant Linda Kramer, the American carnival is a place to capture souls in transit.
“Ever since she was a kid at summer camp, Linda Kramer has had an eye for portraiture. “My parents gave me an Instamatic camera, and I would shoot like crazy for the entire week I was away,” she remembers. “I’d shoot all my friends and even people I didn’t know. Then I’d come home and show the pictures to my family, and they would say, ‘Where’s the camp?’ Because it was all people. The same thing happened in 1998 when Kramer, all grown up and equipped with a Hasselblad 503cm, visited a Concord, California carnival. It was the people that caught her eye there, too. In fact, that outing launched Kramer’s ongoing American Carnival Portraits project, which has taken her to fairs and carnivals throughout California, the Midwest, and Hawaii. Kramer carefully controls every step in creating the images, which are captured on Kodak Portra 160VC film and ultimately rendered in vibrant 30×40-inch C-prints with a 26×26-inch image area that makes her tightly-composed subjects seem to jump out of the frame. The quality of her prints has much to do with Kramer’s meticulous, old-school darkroom technique, which involves a Jobo drum processor that she bought at a swap meet and repaired herself with skateboard parts.”
Megan is a creative producer at Wise Elephant.
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