Old Fields: Photography, Glamour, and Fantasy Landscape

13: Chrome

 Chrome In the mid- s, Eastman Kodak advertised its aluminum, collapsible S- as a psychedelic camera intended for young women. I carried one everywhere in college and aimed it only at women. %%^ IN THE LATE SPRING OF , IN THE EARLY AFTERnoon when the moist air caused the slanting sunlight to turn golden, I found the near-perfect nereid wading a few yards ahead of my boat. Relaxed among chartreuse marsh grass and wearing a chartreuse bikini, she smiled at me and suggested the time had come for me to point the Rolleiflex toward her. At age twenty-three I recognized the opportunity: a woman my age, confident and happy in the marshes we both loved, drenched in yellow light and wearing a bikini matching the color of the grass. She made the marsh surround her, and seemed to radiate light and some indescribable force too. The light bouncing up from the shallow water below her knees made her seem to float among the marsh grass hiding her feet submerged in black mud. She posed confidently, with abandon. And the Eastman Kodak color transparency and negative film registered the chartreuse as a sickly, chemical-spill yellow or olive drab: the marsh materialized on film as a hazardous waste site and the bikini as faded and splotched. The photography store proprietor telephoned his specialist processor at once, then handed me the phone. A bored, technical voice informed me that Kodak color film registered chartreuse poorly. The processing plant could do nothing about the transparencies, but offered to correct prints made from the negatives so long as I submitted a swatch of material. I replied that the bikini existed as little more than a swatch, and vowed to never again photograph a model wearing chartreuse.¹ The bikinied woman belonged in the salt-marsh creek at the head of the bay, and so did I, my boat, and my medium-format camera. But perhaps color film did not. Later the nereid scowled at the images, heard my film chemistry explanation derived from Eastman Kodak Company technical leaflet E-, then smiled and suggested we try underwater photography. She would wear a black bikini, and surely I could photograph that in a way transcending fashion-magazine imagery. I did not own (and still do not own) a Franke and Heidecke Rolleimarin unit, the sealed housing that enables a diver to take a Rolleiflex under water. But I knew that such imagery fixed the attention of many young women, especially those casually confident in very brief suits, not only on beaches and in boats but in the water. Hans Hass invented the Rolleimarin around  to facilitate his marine biology work. By the early s professional fashion photographers knew it as a reliable if astronomically expensive Franke and Heidecke accessory enabling image making beyond the reach of all but the most determined well-off enthusi- %%` old fields ast photographers.² Hass’s books demonstrated that color film registered differently below the surface, especially in sunny shallows, that water foreshortened distance, and other technical issues new to most photographers .³ The postwar woman confident in scanty attire and swimming with abandon morphed into a nereid in the habitat Hass and other marine biologists explored: she became a new creature, or at least one newly discovered, one somehow superior to the dune-jumping girls Lohse photographed .⁴ Owners of mm cameras disliked the Rolleimarin. It reinforced the role of the Rolleiflex as the facilitator of glamour and catapulted the bulky, square-format camera into a new era charged with physicality and sexuality, both emblemized by bikinied woman, especially those at home in the sea. Rolleiflex owners knew Hass and his experiments early. Only a year a"er his first book on photographing Caribbean coral and sharks appeared in , Walter Heering published his underwater-photography technical manual.⁵ By then Hass had joined an elite German army underwater unit, where he began developing what became the Rolleimarin immediately following the war. Franke and Heidecke emphasized the accessory as soon as the firm began manufacturing cameras again; it became an icon demonstrating technical mastery, wealth, and welcome for a new woman. A"er the wartime hiatus, company advertising (especially flyers distributed in photography stores), the magazine Rolleigrafie, and technical manuals acquainted American Rolleiflex photographers not only with the Rolleikin but with the radiance characterizing bikinied women. In  Humberto Fontova recalled his...