A Season of Festivals by Frank Cost

A Season of Festivals Frank Cost

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any

mechanical or electronic means without written permission of the author, except in the case of brief excerpts embodied in critical articles and reviews. Published by Fossil Press

100 Parkwood Avenue

Rochester, New York 14620 Designed by Frank Cost

Printed and bound by Merlin International in the USA ISBN 978-0-9848047-8-8

to my fellow Rochesterians

Sequence from Twelve Seconds at the Lilac Festival, 2006

inter in Rochester is long. The first snow can fall as early as late October. Frigid Arctic air

blows across Lake Ontario, picking up large amounts of water, which is then deposited in

the form of “lake effect” snow to the south and east of the lake. Even when it isn’t snowing, Roch-

ester’s winter sky is usually overcast, the sun rarely visible. During the warm season (mid-May

through late September) people try to make up for their long winter hibernation with a furious pursuit of outdoor experiences. Boats and bikes and barbeque grills abound, and the city celebrates the return of warmth and light with a variety of festivals.

The Lilac Festival, timed to coincide with the blooming of the lilac bushes in Highland Park in early May, is the largest and longest of the festivals, running for ten days and attracting nearly half a million visitors each year. Here people come together to drink beer, listen to pop music, and consume

outrageous foods, like fried dough with powdered sugar and enormous deep-fried “blooming onions,” that they would be reluctant to eat under any other circumstances. At the Lilac Festival we all

share a common relief from surviving another winter in Rochester, and this accomplishment, more than the appearance of the fragrant and short-lived lilac flowers, is what we are really celebrating.

Many of the festivals have themes that influence the mix of people attending. The annual Street Machines of Rochester car show held each June is perhaps the best example. Music, crafts, and ethnic foods are other common festival themes. Each festival also reflects the particulars of its location, whether in one of the historic neighborhoods like Corn Hill or Park Avenue, on a bridge

spanning the Genesee River, in a commercial district like the Rochester Public Market or East End, or perched above the gorge at High Falls.

I have tried for years to capture my experience of the festivals in photographs. But the standard photographic frame, no matter how wide the lens, seems inadequate to the job. I am always aware that many things are happening simultaneously outside of the frame that may or may not be relevant to what is happening inside. In 2006, I tried to solve this problem by shooting sequences of pictures that revealed the broader context of each individual frame. One sequence of images became an experimental book entitled Twelve Seconds at the Lilac Festival, an attempt to represent the experience of a brief walk through the crowd at the festival.

Soon after completing this book, I began to think about using panoramic photography to expand

beyond the spatial and temporal restrictions of the single frame. In 2010, I experimented with panoramic imaging of densely populated indoor and outdoor events using a small camera equipped

with an automatic panoramic feature. The results were not promising. People in motion were converted into multi-headed monstrosities or disembodied torsos with detached limbs. Details in a few

of these failed pictures resembled deliberate photographic parodies of classic Picasso portraits. In

2011, I began to work with a slower manual method of shooting separate frames and then using

Photoshop to stitch them together to form a single tableau. Panoramic images produced in this way elevate the complexities of the real world over the intellectual control of the photographer and regain the dimension of surprise that has always been the primal delight of photography.

The inspiration for A Season of Festivals came at the end of the winter of 2012. During the first two weeks of April, ten photographers from the Magnum Agency visited Rochester to photograph the

city and surrounding community that has been home to the Eastman Kodak Company for more

than a century. In January, Kodak had filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, and was in the

early stages of reorganization. The Magnum visit was part of an experimental project called “Postcards from America” that had begun the previous year with an extended trip by many of the same

photographers across the Western U.S. While the goals of the photographers in the Rochester phase of the project (“House of Pictures”) were diverse, the project as a whole was intended to

create an archive of images that would serve as a documentary record of life in Rochester at that particular moment in history.

At the conclusion of the visit, a pop-up exhibition of images was displayed at the Rochester Vi-

sual Studies Workshop. These “House of Pictures” images reflected the signature styles of the photographers who took them. Anyone who knows the work of Alec Soth, Bruce Gilden, Martin

Parr, Alex Webb, Paulo Pellegrin, Alessandra Sanguinetti, Donovan Wylie, Susan Meiselas, Larry Towell, or Jim Goldberg, could instantly see the eye and hand of these celebrated photographers

in their depictions of Rochester. Overall, the Magnum collection painted a powerful and somewhat dark portrait of a city and culture in decline. The choice of early April for the visit meant that all of

the photographs reflected the fatigue of people who had just endured nearly six months of cold

weather, having all but lost hope that warm weather would ever return. If a photographer is inclined to create the darkest portrayal of life in Rochester possible, there is indeed no better time of year.

My panoramic pictures of the 2012 Rochester festival season are intended to broaden and enrich

the visual record of life in Rochester during the same year that marked the Magnum visit. By the end of the season I had amassed a collection of about a hundred finished images that were imprisoned on my hard drive. The problem with panoramas is that they need to be printed or displayed large to be properly evaluated. But because the high cost of making large prints was prohibitive, I archived the digital images to await an uncertain future incarnation.

A solution was finally suggested in an early Spring 2013 email from Doug Smith, one of the owners of Merlin International, a digital commercial printer in Rochester. Merlin had just acquired a new

Xeikon 8500 digital color press, capable of printing panoramic images up to 20 inches in one dimension and as long as necessary in the other. Doug was looking for test images to show potential

customers the capabilities of the new machine. I told Doug that I had a collection of panoramic images on my hard disk that I had not yet printed or even seen at their proper size. In exchange

for using the files to demonstrate the new press, Merlin printed the full set of images. With this set, I was able to show the prints to a number of colleagues who then helped me evaluate and select

the final prints for a gallery exhibition and publication. With the support of Xeikon, Merlin graciously agreed to produce the final images for exhibition.

The images are sequenced in chronological order, beginning in early May with the opening ceremony of the first festival of the 2012 season on the campus of Rochester Institute of Technology, and

ending in mid September as I departed the â&#x20AC;&#x153;Greentopia Festivalâ&#x20AC;? at High Falls, walking on the Pont de Rennes pedestrian bridge across the Genesee River gorge back to my parked car.

Frank Cost

Rochester, New York June 2013

The Festivals May 2012

• Imagine RIT Innovation and Creativity Festival

• City Newspaper Best Busker Contest

• Lilac Festival

• Church of the Annunciation Greek Festival

June 2012

• Street Machines of Rochester Annual Auto Show

• Party on the Driving Park Bridge

• Xerox Rochester International Jazz Festival

July 2012

• Independence Day Celebration on the Main Street Bridge

• Corn Hill Arts Festival

• Party in the Park

• Party on the Bricks at the Rochester Public Market

August 2012

• Park Avenue Summer Arts Festival

• Hochstein Lunchtime Concert Series at the High Falls

September 2012

• Greentopia Festival at High Falls

A Season of Festivals

Imagine RIT Innovation and Creativity Festival, May 5, 2012

City Newspaper Best Busker Contest, May 10, 2012

Lilac Festival, May 12, 2012

Lilac Festival, May 14, 2012

Lilac Festival, May 16, 2012

Lilac Festival, May 17, 2012

Lilac Festival, May 18, 2012

Lilac Festival, May 19, 2012

Lilac Festival, May 20, 2012

Lilac Festival grounds one week after the close of the Festival, May 2012

Church of the Annunciation Greek Festival, May 31, 2012

Street Machines of Rochester Annual Auto Show, June 10, 2012

Party on the Driving Park Bridge, June 15, 2012

Xerox Rochester International Jazz Festival, June 22, 2012

Xerox Rochester International Jazz Festival, June 23, 2012

Xerox Rochester International Jazz Festival, June 25, 2012

Xerox Rochester International Jazz Festival, June 26, 2012

Independence Day Celebration on the Main Street Bridge, July 4, 2012

Corn Hill Arts Festival, July 7, 2012

Party in the Park, July 12, 2012

Party on the Bricks at the Rochester Public Market, Latino Night, July 13, 2012

Park Avenue Summer Arts Festival, August 5, 2012

Hochstein Lunchtime Concert Series at the High Falls, August 16, 2012

Greentopia Festival at High Falls, September 15, 2012

Acknowledgments and Production Notes The idea for this project, and most of the photographs, were generated during a sabbatical granted by Roch-

ester Institute of Technology during the 2011– 2012 academic year. Many thanks to RIT Provost Jeremy Haefner and my colleagues in the RIT College of Imaging Arts & Sciences for the time and support necessary to

complete the project. Patricia Cost edited all the text, critiqued every image, and scrutinized every page. Patty contributed substantially to every important decision from initial concept to final output. She also provided

transportation services, logistical support and encouragement during the shooting phase of the project. Amelia Hugill-Fontanel, Assistant Curator of the RIT Cary Graphic Arts Collection, and Therese Mulligan, Administra-

tive Chair of the RIT School of Photographic Arts & Sciences, helped select images from the first set of proofs for exhibition and publication. Zerbe Sodervick was instrumental in arranging for the first public exhibition of these photographs at Gallery R, RIT’s downtown gallery. The prints in the exhibition and in this book were

made by Sandor Hopenwasser (BFA RIT School of Photographic Arts & Sciences, MS RIT School of Media Sciences). Sandor was able to engineer a way to print the entire show on one continuous roll of paper on

Merlin’s new Xeikon 8500 digital color press, incorporating all of the images and text. The ability to create

innovative graphic solutions like this, using the latest digital technologies, is a specialty of Merlin International. The exhibition opened on September 5, 2013, and was featured in the 2013 First Niagara Rochester Fringe

Festival. Owen Butler, Michael Peres, and David Pankow provided valuable critical feedback on the work as

it progressed. Students in my panoramic photography course were among the first to see the full-sized proof prints, and helped fine-tune the paper and color rendering choices for the exhibition prints. Their excitement for the panoramic format was a welcome source of motivation for my work on this project during the spring 2013 quarter.

All of the pictures in this book were created by combining three overlapping frames taken in rapid succession with a DSLR camera mounted on a monopod. Adobe Photoshop was used to assemble the images. In two

cases, this technique resulted in multiple appearances of the same person in a picture. The assembled images were adjusted for print reproduction in Adobe Lightroom and exported as JPEG files.

About the Author Frank Cost is the James E. McGhee Distinguished Professor in the School of Photographic Arts & Sciences at Rochester Institute of Technology. He has taught a wide variety of courses in the field of visual media for more than three decades. Frank has been photographing professionally since 1975 and has authored numerous

books and articles exploring innovative forms of graphic expression enabled by digital technology. He can be contacted at frank.cost@rit.edu.