The house lights lower and the stage lights rise as a performer enters stage right. A camera shutter clicks, breaking the silence. Translucent ghosts float around the stage at the Ninth Annual
Cincy Fringe Festival, a 12-day celebration of plays, solo shows, dance, multimedia and variety performances that lured nearly 8,000 visitors to Over the Rhine locales.
While ghosts are the theme of "Don't Cross the Stream," a 2012 Fringe play, in this instance, the translucent ghosts appear in a long-exposure photograph of another work of art.
Long exposure photography has been around since the 1800s. Matt Steffen, owner of
Matt Steffen Photography and chair of the Visual Fringe component of the festival from 2007 to 2010, resurrected it this year in an effort to document, and share, the power of Fringe.
Eric Vosmeier, Fringe producing artistic director and
Know Theatre director, has experimented with ways to capture the spirit of Fringe for years. As the Festival continues to attract out-of-town artists, performers and audiences, as it reaches outside of traditional theater and into schools and basements and streets, long exposure photography offered a distinctively fresh, though time-tested, way to illustrate the creativity of and energy in the festival’s performances.
"I've been playing with [the idea] for quite a while, and it seemed to fit this particular venue,” Steffen says. “It seemed fringe to me."
Long exposure’s futurist roots certainly sound Fringe. "On one hand it's realistic, it is a photograph,” Steffen says, “but on the other hand it's not realistic and spaciously confusing.”
Long exposure photography requires special equipment beyond the requisite digital camera. Because Steffen is shooting in dark theaters with bright overhead lights, he needs a neutral density filter to keep images from simply registering as ultra bright pictures washed out in white light. The lens filter reduces the picture to what looks like an ultra dark picture, but is actually perfect with the long exposure method.
A sturdy tripod keeps the camera steady, because any motion can ruin the continuity of the long exposure. Steffen learned the hard way when he had to edit a section out of one performance after the tripod’s legs slowly gave way, shifting the frame.
Steffen also uses a remote-control typically used by astro-photographers, who use varied techniques to capture large areas of the night sky in images. The special remote allows him to set the number of minutes between each frame as well as how many total frames are taken during a set time.
Steffen learned early that leaving the iris of his digital camera open for longer than four minutes resulted in pictures mottled with white spots. Through trial and error, he determined that magic number, four minutes for each frame. With four-minute exposures, the white spots appeared in numbers small enough for him to edit out.
Using the astro-photographers’ remote, he sets four minutes between frames and the number of four-minute frames it takes to photograph the performance. A click of a button and the remote do the rest. Steffen then collects the images from a single show and uses Photoshop to combine them into one long exposure photograph. So far, his longest exposure has been 64 minutes.
During Fringe, Steffen was surprised that the performers not only took interest in his technique, they learned from it. "Actors have come up to me and said, 'I really should spread my show out more. I stand on the right side 75 percent of the time, and I would have never have known.’ "
The long exposure project has been a learning experience. In one early attempt, he shot a dance troupe that performed for 30 minutes straight and never stopped moving. When the shoot was over, he looked at the image, and discovered that other than the stage, it was completely empty. None of the dancers showed up in the image.
Steffen worried. "It would be really horrible to fail in front of everyone spectacularly," he says. When he realized he would never get a square, front-of-the-stage image, he played with angles and positions. “I have to find an interesting angle and make sure that's lined up first, and the rest is out of my control."
As an artist, though, he hopes to learn new things and find deeper meaning in a project. "The concept of time and the idea of these stages sitting there with these swirls passing through them, when you're kind of seeing the whole show at once. . . . it's kind of like a reduced Cliff’s Notes version of the show,” he says. “But it's possible that nothing shows up at all, and all that's left is the props. All that’s left is a light in the corner.
For Steffen, the meaning transcends what is and is not captured in an image. “It takes very little time for us to disappear,” he says. “If we walk quickly for 30 seconds, we don't register on the film.”
Sean Thomson attended Fringe this year and viewed Steffen’s work at the Know Underground, the Festival’s daily after-party. "I like how the photos capture the mark left by performers on the stage,” he says. “It's more comprehensive than a still photo."
Steffen agrees, and likes the idea of shooting Fringe because it's one "artistic process documenting another artistic process." Still, as a Fringe proponent, he admits his interest is as promotional as it is technical.
"There are still people who don't know about the festival," Steffen says. He hopes that his work, and the work of others, can build awareness and excitement about Fringe and its far-reaching components. The goal is to place prints in every theater that participates in Fringe.
Steffen's long exposure photography is currently on display in two different forms. In its digital form, it can be found on
Facebook. For those who want to look at physical prints there are a selection displayed across from the bar in the Know Underground, which is located in the basement of the Know Theatre.
Shaun McClanahan is a University of Cincinnati student who studies history and dabbles in journalism. This is his first feature for Soapbox.