Light & Land

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Well, well, Charlie’s been keeping a secret…!

20th September 2017

Age is always a delicate subject to broach, but we never realised quite how good Charlie looks for his age... according to this wonderful little story, Charlie has been photographing since the mid-1890s!

All jokes aside, it was a wonderful moment for Charlie to discover this story during a weekend stay in Bognor Regis. Charlie noticed the owner of the house was also an avid photograpy fan and he stumbled upon this book. It was only whilst reading that he discovered this story and noticed the subject of the piece was also a photographr called Charlie Waite, back in the mid 1890s!

The photograph is titled "Doing the Washing in Mexico, ca. 1900" and the artist "Charles B Waite. American, active 1890s - 1900s"

"Doing the Washing in Mexico," by Charles B.Waite, a professional photographer working in Los Angeles, California, in the mid-1890s, also contains both a sense of place and a feeling of activity that allow the viewer to believe in the scene and share something of the mood. The difference is that Waite, who took photographic trips through the American SouthWest and Mexico in search of picturesque scenes, is working with a photographic technology that is far more flexible than Villalba's. Waite's improved lenses and glass plates allowed him to photograph out-of-doors, to include groups of people without fear that one or more would move and blur the image, and to compose his photograph with a depth of field far deeper than the shallow space found in most portraits from the 1870s. Waite used all these advantages very well in his Mexican photograph, an ethnographic tourist image, emphasizing cultural difference and the "exotic".

Charlie said "I think this must be a sign for Light and Land to introduce a tour to Mexico - watch this space!"

Light and Land

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