Lost Art Press

When Taking Photos, Think Dim

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As a photographer, nothing makes me happier than a cloudy day.

Clouds are the world’s most effective, least expensive and least predictable diffusers. They mute shadows, mellow colors and reduce contrast. Why am I telling this to a bunch of woodworkers? Well, as a magazine editor I received hundreds of “print my article” submissions that featured a beautiful highboy in a grassy setting with full sun.

I know what these guys were thinking. Taking the photo outdoors allowed them to use a fast shutter speed and small aperture without a tripod. It also made the furniture look unnatural, like a wookie in a thong. All the details of their piece are hidden in shadow (actually a good thing with thonged wookie pics). All the corners are blown out in high relief.

If you take photos of your work, buy a tripod. Period. Buy a good one (look for used Italian ones on Craigslist). Get a shutter release cable for your camera. Use a medium aperture (like f8) and let the shutter go as slow as it wants. Some photos I take require a three-second shutter speed.

And, if you are going to shoot outside, make sure your project belongs outside (birdhouse, planter, punji stick trap for opossums) and wait for a cloudy day – or shoot at first light in the morning or at last light in the evening so the light is more diffuse.

Today I took some photos of my Roorkhee chairs before sending them out to their new homes. The photos in the morning were with full sun and were a disaster – I was trying to find some dappled shade. After dinner I went out under some full cloud cover and tried again.

— Christopher Schwarz

All Glamour, all the Time

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Come on children and gather ‘round, and let me tell you a secret about a Frenchman renowned.

Ready?

The manuscripts of Roubo were not perfect.  Shhh.

I admit it, right now I am simply taking a moment to escape the gut-grinding work of polishing words, backfilling those areas where old J.A. didn’t tell us everything he knew, or at least didn’t tell us everything we wanted to know. In addition to hundreds of editorial comments inserted into the text, in order to mitigate the passages where the reader will likely scratch their head and say, “Huh?” I wrote almost a score of additional explanatory essays to fill in some of those voids.  While these have been roughly done for some time, it is only lately that we have begun to add the visual descriptions to go with my verbal explanations.

Making the process even more tedious is my own ambivalence to the world of photography. It’s just not a bug I ever caught. While I truly appreciate skillful and creative photographic imagery (for example I am literally agog sometimes at the artworks emerging from the back end of Narayan Nayar’s camera when he is shooting the H.O. Studley tool cabinet) if you absolutely positively needed a great photo, I would not be the first person to call.

Still, with copious counsel from Chris and Wesley Tanner, the book’s designer, we are on the way to completion.  The lights are in place, the reference color bar is included, the cameras are on their tripods and the exercises are being replicated.  Lights. Camera. Action. Or more precisely given the often slow shutter speeds in my grotto, “Lights, Camera, Inaction.” We don’t keep track of the pictures we are taking, but a rough estimate would be a bazillion. It is all glamour, all the time.

The final result is most gratifying as it emerges from the cramped cave-like quarters of my basement workshop (by comparison Chris’s workshop is positively capacious), and integrated into the essay text. In the end this process represents beautifully our vision for “To Make As Perfectly As Possible.” As meaningful an accomplishment as a scholarly translation would be, it might be little more than a historical curiosity on a dusty library shelf if left alone. Instead we want these volumes to inform and transform you as an artist. We hope that my extra 15,000 words and Michele’s 125 photographs – added to the 94,000 words and almost 350 engravings from Roubo – help do just that.

— Don Williams

Inside the Aiken-Rhett House

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While I wasn’t willing to disobey the photography rules of the Aiken-Rhett house in Charleston, S.C., other photographers have – or were granted permission by the Historic Charleston Foundation.

If you want to see the pieces of furniture for the slave quarters that I referenced in my blog entry, you can check out these sites:

This Flickr.com set has 80 photos of the house, including pictures of the slave quarters and their furnishings.

Photographer Julia Cart has this photo from the slave quarters.

This blogger has photos of the slave kitchen and his young girlfriend/wife.

The photo at the top of the entry is by me and is of the gate to the slaves’ work yard.

— Christopher Schwarz

Roorkhee No. 2: Strapless

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My second version of a Roorkhee chair features details found on other traditional early 20th-century chairs – the most notable difference being that this chair does not have leather straps running left and right below the seat.

This strapless setup seems to be far more common in the historical photos I’ve examined of Roorkhee chairs at war and on safari.

The good news is that this chair sits just the same as the earlier version I built.

The even better news (for me) is that I have lots more variations to explore in the upcoming months because I have orders for several more of these chairs and will be teaching a class in making them next summer at the Marc Adams School of Woodworking.

The Roorkhee chair – sometimes called the Indian chair – was in production for much longer than my earlier sources suggested. I’ve found manufactured versions that look like they are from the 1970s. So there’s lots of territory for me and other woodworkers to trek through – different leg turnings, wood, hardware, leather strapping and so forth.

There’s even a version I’ve found that’s covered in fur. It will be great for your next winter adventure – or wife-swapping party I suppose.

My next variations will focus on the leather – I have some dyed leather sides coming that are waterproof and others that are dyed different colors on either side.

I still need to find a source for sewing some canvas seat covers, however. Otherwise I’m going to get a bad reputation in the bovine community.

— Christopher Schwarz

The Furniture of Insanity

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The view of the back of the house from the slave’s work yard. The main house (yellow) is flanked by the slave quarters (left) and the carriage house (right).

Our Sunday-afternoon tour of the Aiken-Rhett house in Charleston, S.C., began in the basement of the historic structure. And as far as I was concerned, it could have ended there.

The first room on the tour is the so-called “warming room,” where slaves would hold the food that was about to be served to the masters upstairs – up the back stairwell of course.

This room contained a stretcher table that looked just like many of the stretcher tables I’ve been investigating at the Museum of Early Southern Decorative Arts. A ladderback chair in front of the hearth looks like the chairs in my files. The built-in cupboards were detailed with simple beads for the most part – plus some other straightforward profiles.

The reason this room was so intoxicating is the Aiken-Rhett house is my favorite kind of house museum. Instead of trying to restore the structure to some certain point in its history, the Historic Charleston Foundation committed itself to preserving the house in its current state. Not adding. Not taking away. Not changing. Just suspending the house in time after an amazing 192-year run in a city at the epicenter of our country’s volatile history.

So the furniture is the real stuff. Not reimagined or restored or rebuilt to some modern plan. The walls throughout the house are in various stages of decay, with the shadow of every layer of wallpaper and built-in still evident.

The warming room, slave quarters and work yard are interesting and striking to me because they have aged far better than the rooms reserved for the masters. The slave quarters feature simple plaster walls. The moulding at the floor is simple yellow pine with a bead at the top. The original furniture is nothing special, and yet it wears its scars from age better than the high-style stuff in the main house.

In the fancy part of the house the elaborate mouldings, plaster work, wallpaper and paint haven’t survived as well – no surprise considering the fragility of the materials. The original furniture was fairly well cared for, though the post-1830 stuff is awkward, heavily veneered and infused with classicism (to my eye). Interestingly, the slave’s work yard was built with Gothic details.

So what the heck does all this mean? Glad you asked. The Aiken-Rhett house is definitely a four-story touchstone for my next book, “The Furniture of Necessity.” Until I walked into the cool, dark confines of the house’s warming room, I was wondering if my ideas for the book were nuts. After 10 minutes poking around the warming room, I became certain my ideas for the book were nuts – and dead-nuts correct.

— Christopher Schwarz

P.S. My apologies for the photos. The museum’s policy is to allow photos only from exterior vantage points. If you are ever in Charleston, I highly recommend a visit to this home.