I was looking for a poster from the Marianne Faithfull show at Scorgies to put on the Scorgies site and I started rummaging through some old scrapbooks. I came across this “stat” (photo from a line camera used in graphic arts in the old days). Mechanical artists were expected to know how to use a stat camera in those days and you were always running to the darkroom to shoot a logo or blow up some type or just hang around in the dark. The paper that we used could only show black or white, no gray tones, and you usually waxed the back of the photo paper and stuck down on on a mechanical board. This was called a “paste up”. These cameras could do a halftone but you had to put a screen on top of the paper before exposing it. It was usually 65 or 85 line. And your image was still black or white, you just had tiny little black dots to represent the gray tones.
Sometimes the camera was way out of focus or maybe you forgot to put the image you wanted to copy in and you would get some surprising results. I don’t remember how the image above came about. Maybe I just found it in the trash. It still looks pretty good.
Some bigger ad agencies had their their own camera guys. I worked at one place where the guy closed the dark room door, cranked Thin Lizzy and smoked pot all day. He asked that we just slide requests under the door. And the guy at Sibleys would take naps in the dark room. You had to wake him up to get a shot. Of course he was following the Greatful Dead all over the Northeast at night. He had a real darkroom setup in there and he made enlargements of Jerry that he sold at the shows.
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