This just in from a married-with-kids-in-the-suburbs friend of mine (names changed to protect the guilty) …
I am in a pickle that involves color processing of a roll of 24 color prints — ASA 400. The issue involves developing a roll of color prints. My family (including our 8 year old son, Billy, and our 6 year old daughter, Susan) just got back from 3 weeks in Maine. It was great fun. We had some friends visit for a few days with their 6 year old daughter. One night while the adults were hanging out the kids were playing in their bedroom and got naked. Then a little while later, they called me in to see. “Mom, come see!” I went in and found Billy, my son, naked, and the girls had tied him to the bunk bed ladder and put a pillowcase over his head. VERY stupidly and totally without thinking, I snapped a picture (#20 on roll of 24 color pictures) just to capture the visual moment because it struck me how innocent they were while creating such an awful vision. Of course, this was totally done in fun and the kids have no idea why I told them to stop.
My problem: I’d like to develop this roll of color prints —— because I want the other pictures on the roll but I do not know how a camera store would receive that one shot of Billy naked and tied up.
I’m sure there are plenty of voyeurs at Ofoto, Shutterfly, SnapFish, etc. to keep this issue around for a while.
I haven’t seen “Short cuts” in a while, but I remember there was indeed a plot thread about a group of people who had gone fishing, found the corpse of a girl and had waited until they got home (3 days later) to call the police. That came from one of the Raymond Carver stories that were adapted for the film.
Sorry if this is a stupid answer, I’m a digital guy, but is there a way to rewind the film manually and re-expose that picture for some unreasonably long time? I suppose one might ruin the adjacent pictures if there is no way to be sure of the location with any precision, but it seems like a decent CYA solution to recover the other portions of the roll. Scissors may also be an option, but again my world is CF.
I don’t know if you have a dark-room, Phil, but surely one of your close acquaintances does. Having the photos developed by a skilled amateur would be acceptable, wouldn’t it? (I’m sure you thought of this but I wonder why you didn’t mention it…)
Just send the roll out to A&I in LA and have the film developed but not printed. If your friend wants the picture printed, he could have someone scan it into the computer for him.
Why has no one mentioned how horrible this is? I am not sure those children are that innocent and one has to question the parents.
Burn the film and never tell this story again. Have the webmaster delete your write-up.
The children are certainly innocent of whatever it is you’re projecting into their heads, Kelly. It’s called “play,” and sometimes it takes startlingly libertine forms. My daughter used to love putting her stuffies “on trial,” which usually ending in hangings of the stuffies. (Prior to hanging, they were typically subjected to “humiliating” masquerades, which might be interpreted as exercises in cross-dressing and definitely in bondage.) She laments that we no longer have a bunk or a loft bed in the house (we moved to an earthquake-prone part of the country and got rid of double-decker sleeping) because that kind of bed enabled her, in cahoots with her brother, to construct the perfect scaffold.
Let me just add that this kid also has a signed letter from the presnit (yes, Dubya) in response to an ecology letter she wrote to him when she was 7 (this was 3 years ago), and that she also wrote him another letter a year or so later (after we moved to Canada) to tell him that the death penalty was evil. He didn’t write back. (She was appalled that the teenaged killer Lee Boyd Malvo might be executed, and that others suffered the same barbaric fate.)
Kids play because they need to experience their theories from all sorts of different angles, not all of which can be accessed via logic and language in some linear path. She used to have “public hangings” for her stuffed animals, but she has written impassioned letters to the president to stop capital punishment. I interpret this to mean that she has had deep thoughts about the issue, and it is not my job, my duty, or my mandate to control her thinking.
I do not believe there is anything wrong with the kids Phil describes. Playing “doctor”? Tying yourself (or a friend) up in bed? Putting a bag over your head? Kids’ stuff, literally. The “bad” part is when the adults come in and tell the kids to shut off that part of their thinking/ exploring. It was play. It wasn’t the case that they were pulling the wings off flies or snipping ear tissue off a cat or doing something horrible to an unwilling live creature. That would be something to worry about, but theatre? Nuh-uh.
We don’t want to lose the distinction between the (often dangerous) play of imagination and reality; we’ve blurred a lot already, which might be why so many of our profit-driven (real) products of (imaginative) play wreak real havoc in real people’s lives. (Think so-called “reality tv.”) Let’s go after corporate criminals, but let’s let kids have their imaginations. That “awful vision” they created was a visual tableau of their thinking (seemingly largely motivated by the girls) about power. If it strikes anyone as “awful” or questionable, …well, the kids are processing this for a reason.
“Question the parents”?? Sounds like thought-police.
As for developing the film: find someone who can do it privately, I guess. Then take just those negatives that won’t raise eyebrows to a commercial lab for printing.
And re.: the digital revolution, Phil: don’t you think it’s worse than before, insofar as the autorities can probably dig up a digital fingerprint, whereas you could always just burn the old-style negative…?
So why doesn’t this guy just get his film developed with no prints? I don’t see any problem here except a lack of imagination. He can eliminate the troublesome negative and then resubmit the other negatives for prints later. He can just say he is going to have the negatives scanned later if someone asks if he needs a proof sheet.
Actually, the solution to your friend’s dilemma is quite simple. Don’t develop the film until Kodak rolls out its Film Processing Station to a store in her neighborhood. The Film Processing Station (FPS) was developed by Applied Science Fiction Corp. (now a division of Kodak). It’s a “dry” development system that actually destroys the negative after it’s done scanning the photographs onto a Kodak Picture CD. It’s a self-service device; no store employee will see the offending picture. Below are two URL’s, one from Kodak main web site, the other from Kodak’s Applied Science Fiction (ASF) web site that describes the Kodak Film Processing Station.
http://www.kodak.com/US/en/corp/researchDevelopment/productFeatures/kpmg3.shtml
http://www.asf.com/products/FPS/fps.asp
I’m STUNNED!
Where in heavens name did your kids learn to play like this???
Thought Police Indeed — that’s YOUR job Dad!
I heard George “Nucular” Bush refer to it as Abu Garaiff?? What’s going on here??!!