Film Is Not Dead

December 23, 2022 5:29 AM

Frank Thorp V (instagram) is a producer and reporter for NBC News. His beat covers photographing Congressional activities in a big way. His latest project with fellow reporter Sarah Mimms is the portrait series Faces of the Investigation, covering the people involved in the Jan 6 hearings.

Interview with Emulsive from 2020 covering his origins with film and his workflow inside the halls of the Capitol.

posted by backseatpilot (5 comments total)

Reading through that Faces of... piece made me kind of sad, knowing that many of those people are likely to be subpoenaed before whatever kangaroo committee the upcoming republican house puts together to “reverse” the findings of the jan.6 committee. The level of public personal attack and vilification will be disgusting, even by current republican standards.
posted by Thorzdad at 6:39 AM on December 23, 2022

Thank you for posting this. I was on a text thread with two fellow photojournalists during the first hearing and we were wondering who the "other guy" with a large format graflex was covering the hearing. David Burnett is usually the only DC photojournalist brave enough to cover important hearings, inaugurations and what not with a graflex so it was strange to see someone else (Thorp) running around with a 4x5 camera. Burnett was shooting with a graflex throughout the hearings as well although I've not seen his images in the wild yet.

Thorpe's portraits and documentary work from the hearings are outstanding and to have the confidence to work with a large format film camera that was state-of-the-art in the late 1940's while transcending the new gimmickry of film is impressive.
posted by photoslob at 9:04 AM on December 23, 2022 [1 favorite]

Great post and Thorpe's work in large format is so good. I'm so impressed at his focus; the depth of field for a 4x5 image is so narrow, especially when you're shooting as wide open as he does, that it's a bear to get it right.
posted by octothorpe at 3:17 PM on December 23, 2022

Old time news photographers would have not used the Graflex like he does though. They almost always used flashbulbs that were so powerful that they could stop the aperture way down and then set the focus for a middle range. That way they could work faster and not worry so much about getting the focus just right.
posted by octothorpe at 3:27 PM on December 23, 2022

Thorp (who I've been following for a while on Instagram) does make outstanding work on account of the fact that he's following the mo of others, such as Burnett and [Joshua] Paul - work in a field saturated with imagery, but do something different to stand out. In this case, shoot large format.

The film thing is a bit of a distraction, and let's not kid ourselves that there's no gimmickry here either - including the verification borders, having to shoot wide open due to the [likely] low light levels leading to a pictorialist style, having to compose in a way that puts things in the middle of the frame due to the nature of the lens.

It is possible to shoot large format without the baggage of film, there are plenty of photographers doing that, but then, the risk in Thorp's field is ending up with images that look like all the others and of course not having that hook that's different. That's probably the lesson.
posted by lawrencium at 6:30 AM on December 26, 2022