Film, format and a Flextight: how Tropical Garden was made

Every photograph keeps a little of the machine that made it. The artist has not yet told us which camera he carried to Ubud in 2003 — we have asked, and will add his answer here — but the files he handed over already say a good deal. This is what they reveal, and how it fits the fifty years of Japanese cameras he worked through.

What the files say

The master files of Tropical Garden are almost all the same size: 3,679 × 4,677 pixels. Several of them carry an embedded colour profile named Flextight 848, and most were last saved in Adobe Photoshop CS, the version of the mid-2000s.

The Flextight 848 is a film scanner, made by the Danish company Imacon and dating from 2003; Imacon became part of Hasselblad in 2004. So at least part of Tropical Garden was photographed on film and scanned — not made on a digital camera.

A frame of 1 : 1.27

The proportion of those masters is 1 : 1.27. That number rules some cameras out. A 35 mm frame is 1 : 1.5, and a square 6 × 6 frame is 1 : 1. But two classic formats match it almost exactly: 6 × 7 roll film, whose real frame is about 55 × 70 mm (1 : 1.27), and 4 × 5 inch sheet film, about 1 : 1.26.

A proportion is a clue, not proof: a frame can be cropped. But it is consistent with the camera a still-life photographer of his generation would reach for, and it is the reason every print here keeps its full frame, never cropped to fit a standard sheet.

Fifty years of Japanese cameras

Mitsuhashi's working life runs almost exactly alongside the rise of the Japanese camera.

The reflex, 1959–1972. The Nikon F of 1959 made the Japanese single-lens reflex the professional standard. Asahi Optical's Pentax Spotmatic, from 1964, brought through-the-lens metering to millions of photographers — more than four million were sold by 1977. In 1972 Olympus's designer Yoshihisa Maitani released the OM-1, which halved the weight of a professional body. Small, fast 35 mm cameras made possible the street photography of the Provoke generation.

Medium format for the studio, 1969–1970. Advertising and still life asked for something else: a bigger negative. Asahi Optical released the Pentax 6 × 7 in 1969 — a 35 mm-style reflex scaled up for 120 film, promoted as the "ideal format" because its frame enlarged to an 8 × 10 print without cropping. A year later Mamiya's RB67 became the studio camera of the 1970s. Mitsuhashi, an advertising art director until 1972, knew both worlds; and he exhibited twice at the Pentax Gallery, Asahi Optical's own gallery in Roppongi.

Colour transparency, 1990. Fujifilm introduced Fujichrome Velvia in 1990: a slide film of fine grain and saturated greens and reds that defined advertising and magazine colour for a decade. Tropical Garden's deep greens are of that era of colour, whatever film they were made on.

Scanning, 2003. By the 2000s the darkroom was being replaced by the scanner. The Flextight's trick is to hold the film in a gentle curve with no glass in the light path, so there are no Newton's rings and no dust on glass to scan — which is why it was prized for medium and large format.

From negative to pigment

The masters are 350 pixels per inch at about 27 cm wide. At our largest sheet, 18 × 24 inches, the image is printed at about 240 pixels per inch — comfortably above what pigment on textured cotton paper can resolve. That arithmetic is why the collection stops at XL: every size offered is one the original can carry without invention.

What we still don't know

Which camera, which lenses, which film. Whether every picture was scanned from film, or only some. How much was made in Bali and how much in the studio at home. These are questions for the artist himself, and this page will be updated with his answers. If you are a Pentax, Mamiya or Hasselblad user and recognise something in the pictures, we would be glad to hear from you at info@ikkimitsuhashi.com.

Tradescantia & Celadon. The fine leaves at the edge of the frame are where a large negative shows its worth.

Bud & Stoneware, in monochrome.

Sources

• Pentax 6 × 7: Wikipedia, Pentax Forums
• Pentax Spotmatic: Camera-wiki; Olympus OM system: Wikipedia; Mamiya RB67: Wikipedia
• Nikon F: Casual Photophile
• Fujichrome Velvia: Wikipedia
• Imacon Flextight 848: user's guide (Hasselblad)
• File measurements: the artist's original masters, examined by the studio