When you work mostly with your head, like I do, and are surrounded mostly by others who do too, it is often a revelation to meet those who work with their hands. Not that the head isn’t involved as well with them, far from it. But they have these additional skills of creating something of substance – as in can be touched!

When on location for a film project in Astoria, I encountered several young women who worked with their hands as a by-product of my being on set to photograph the film crew. They were, respectively, responsible for designing, sewing and repairing costumes, for make-up and generating certain looks, and for creating, maintaining and fixing props.

I wrote already earlier this year about my admiration for costume design and tailoring in connection with the PHAME rock opera. I have to repeat myself here: the amount of design, planning and execution that goes into the wardrobe of even a small film set, in this case, is exorbitant. You have to be constantly on call, constantly ready, and know everything from cutting patterns to the last bit of ironing on the fly. It is amazing what these seamstresses pull off.

Same, of course, for the mechanical work with props, particularly if they have moving parts and are abused during the film shoots by one too many handlers. You need your own tools, and be ready to create something that the director envisions out of nothing, more often than not, given the budget limits for these art movie operations.

No clue, how much employment there is out there, who gets the good jobs, how you find out about opportunity. Willingness to travel and be away fron your home base, depending on where the shoots are planned, is a must. I don’t even dare to think about health insurance… these young artisans are courageous indeed.

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Making something by hand is also a trend that has resurfaced in photography. And Astoria is home to a photographic gallery that has been at the forefront of showing these alternative process images.

Right now Lightbox has a truly cool exhibit that shows this kind of work in all of its variety. From the Alternative Visions prospectus:

“The alternative process “movement” which began around the 1960s was largely a return to 19th century hand coated processes as an alternative to corporately controlled gelatin silver paper. Today there has been a conflation of gelatin silver, C-prints, 19th century processes, and printmaking into the alternative process genre. Even digital means of image capture are now a part of this practice with some processes such as image transfer or palladium over ink jet which use digital printing in part. The hallmark of the field is that the end result is a hands-on, handmade print.

The entries into Alternative Visions represent a large variety of such processes. Entries ranged from cyanotype to gum, platinum/palladium, silver gelatin, Van Dyke brown, carbon transfer, photogravure, wet plate, tintype, ambrotype, lith, casein, chemigram, lumenprint, and wet plate collodion. The handmade print, taken into so many directions, is obviously alive and well.

You can see the show until the beginning of November. It is worth a trip to Astoria, just not on Sundays, when the gallery is closed. Many of us who have been associated with the gallery for years, both as supporters and as artists, are currently quite worried that the doors might be closed not just on that particular day of the week.

Like for all small galleries it is a struggle for them to maintain high quality work, a large listing of interesting shows and the basic capability of renting and keeping the lights on. In Astoria, a small town at the Oregon coast, there is simply not enough traffic of potential buyers who walk into the door at any given point in time. Nor is there a photographic community of sufficient size that local membership contributions could carry the day.

In other words, those of us, who can, need to step in. Or step up, as the case may be. You need not be a photographer to support the artistic and the educational role this gallery plays in the Pacific Northwest. If you don’t want to become a member, you can simply look at their website, where prints can be ordered, or make a small donation to keep something going that has brought nothing but value to all who have been exposed to its offerings. Paypal is your friend in the link above. Hey, I am your friend, if you don’t mind the fundraising effort!

For music today it shall be something that is an alternative process as well – at least when you are used to normative performances of baroque music. Enjoy!

And here is another version with William Christie