"Testbild"

gelatin silver prints, selenium toned, mounted on cardboard

signed, titled and dated (pencil) on verso

In the early 1970s, they used to broadcast what they called a test card outside of regular TV hours to help technicians adjust the television signal. I was trying to sort out a less than perfect TV image when I discovered a number of other picture adjustments I could make by hand: alter the noise level and sharpness of the analog signal, change the contrast, the brightness, picture height and width, even distort the image. I did various combinations of this directly on the TV set (as opposed to the darkroom), just to see what possibilities the television screen offered. But when I saw the developed negatives as contact prints, I wasn’t happy. The work did not seem innovative enough. Fortunately, my late wife Gabriela – the mother of my children Theodor and Clara, gone far too soon – came across the contact prints in the 1990s and suggested that I make enlarged prints of the negatives after all. So I chose 25 of the 36 photographs and showed them without any specific hanging instructions. The series proved to be one of my most successful.
(Fritz Simak)