So here’s the real truth: I’d just bought a Canon 5D Mark II and I’d found this gorgeous 1950s Zeiss 35mm lens, put an adapter on it, and I was looking for any excuse to shoot with the damn thing. That’s it. That’s why these photos exist.
That’s pretty much why this website exists.
And at this moment it’s not called anything yet. Michael just said he wanted to try this idea out, doing Andy Warhol’s Life of Juanita Castro live, with him directing from Tavel’s script. That’s it. That’s the whole pitch. No Franconia Performance Salon, no #2.
Last time, and I’m not calling that “#1” either, because there’s no series yet, there’s no concept, last time was wigs and iPhones and nobody pretending we were doing anything anything more than playing, like we had three dozen times before. But this time… all I’m actually thinking is: I can bring the new camera. I can see what this Zeiss glass does with skin tones, with depth of field, with the way light falls across a face when someone’s mid-performance.
And fuck if that Zeiss doesn’t render beautifully. That bokeh, that fall-off, the way it catches Helen’s expression, this is what that old glass does that modern lenses can’t quite touch. There’s a softness without being soft, a clarity without being clinical. The engineers at Zeiss in 1955 or whenever weren’t thinking about ironic performance art; they were thinking about light, and somehow that purity comes through sixty years later when you point it at people performing a performance of a film about Fidel’s sister.
So I’m shooting, and yeah, Michael’s directing, and yeah, the actors are committing, but honestly? I’m half in my own world, playing with focus, seeing what happens when I open up the lens all the way, watching how this ancient piece of German engineering interprets the present moment. This is gear-lust masquerading as documentation. This is me justifying my first EBAY purchase.
Fuck me with this fetishization of equipment… the belief that the right gear gets me closer to something true, even though I know that’s probably bullshit, that it’s the eye and the moment and the luck, not the glass. But I believe it anyway because I want to believe it. Because that lens cost real money and it’s beautiful and heavy and it better make everything I point it at more real.
And the sick joke? It kind of does. These images have a quality that my iPhone shots from the wig thing don’t have. Not because this night was more important or more “real,” but because that Zeiss glass is just better. Seventy years of engineering better.
So now these photos exist, and later someone’s going to construct a narrative around them, call it “#2,” make it mean something more than it actually did. But the actual reason they exist is because I had a new toy and my friends, as they had three dozen nights before, gave me an excuse this night to play with it.
That’s more honest than anything we could’ve planned.