'Unpredictable, happy accidents'

Photos by Dennis Stein at Fountain Street Fine Art, Boston. He tells the gallery:

“I have always been drawn to mundane and ordinary subjects, and attempt to give them visual strength. I walk around with a camera or two, and just photograph whatever catches my interest. I then sort through what I have and see what threads there are that run through them. Cameras are fun to use, especially older ones. I recently bought a 1936 Zeiss Ikon Ikoflex TLR for $ 60. It works great. Each film camera, each lens, each kind of film has their own personality, in a sense. So when I combine this camera with this lens and this film, I get a result that is different from another combination, which could be subtle or quite different. I have a few Holga toy cameras, one of which has a funky shutter. A Russian 35mm camera doesn’t always wind to the next frame properly, so I get overlapping negatives. I hand-hold a pinhole camera and make an exposure as I am walking. The resulting images can be totally unpredictable, happy accidents.’’

Mr. Stein is based in the Boston suburb of Medfield. Hit this link for his site.

(Pictures below are not by him.)

One of many abandoned buildings on the eerie grounds of the former Medfield State Hospital, an institution for the mentally ill that opened in 1896 and closed in 2003.

Although the buildings are not open to the public (they have been boarded up), the grounds may be visited during daylight hours. It’s a good place to shoot a horror movie.

Pre-suburb: “The Pool, Medfield,” 1889, by Dennis Miller Bunker. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.