Thirty-six frames in a first-floor room on Mlýnská with two north windows. One of them ends up on your wall.
Four things happen, in this order, every time. Nobody is asked to say cheese.
Roll 014 · frame 06 · 45 minutes inYou sit, the kettle goes on, I load the camera in front of you so you can see there is film in it. No pictures yet. This is the part that makes the rest work.
Thirty-six frames on a tripod at 1/60. No strobe, no reflector, no fan. If the sun goes in we wait for it, which is why the slot is 45 minutes and not 20.
I develop and print a full contact sheet, post it to you, and ring nothing. You ring what you want. Most people choose a frame I would not have.
Your frame goes up as two fibre prints at 20 × 25 cm, selenium toned, plus a 80-megapixel scan of every usable negative. The negatives stay in the drawer here for seven years.
Studio sittings run Tuesday to Friday, 10.00 and 14.00. Two slots a day, never three.
Frame 27 — the twelve minutes after a ceremony, when nobody is looking at anybody.
For the picture that outlives the haircut. Actors, writers, grandmothers, a cellist who refused to hold the cello.
Twenty-two Saturdays a year and no twenty-third. No drone, no sparklers, and never once from the middle of the aisle.
Plain seamless, three changes, retouched only for things that will be gone again next week.
The pencil on the sheet is a china marker, number 2, and it is this colour
Vermilion
A contact sheet is thirty-six small lies and one true thing. The job is finding it, ringing it, and throwing the rest away without apologising for them.
Frame 24 is the one the couple ringed. I had marked 25A. They were right.
2027 season · nine Saturdays unsold
Studio sittings are easier: there is almost always something inside a fortnight.