"Abundance"

photogravure

Important representative of the American pictorialism. Fassbender was born in Germany and time and again returned to the Black Forest or Tyrol to take pictures.
(Fritz Simak)

Luscious fruit cascading in orderly disarray against the tapestried background of horsemen, dogs and the spirit of the chase. How amazingly third-dimensional this colorful bounty seems. Oranges, apples, peaches and grapes… reach out and take some! Feel the down on the soft textured peaches… the hard, shiny apples… the dusty blue and iridescent green and yellow grapes… the bright mottled oranges!As a matter of fact the original of which this print is a copy, is a full color reproduction made by the Three-Color Carbro Process. The color print is now part of the permanent photographic collection of The Smithsonian Institute [sic] in Washington, D.C.
Composition:
To arrange fruit in a pleasing unit and avoid the impression of obvious posing is a difficult feat, and requires painstaking care in selection and disposition of the various sizes, colors, and textures to achieve balance and avoid “bunching”. Notice how the orange at the left is placed above the extended mass of grapes to break up the otherwise monotonous and artistically bad horizontal line formed by the table level and the wall.
Technical Problems:
Photographing such a variation of colors in fruit or any other collection of objects with Panchromatic or Orthochromatic film tends to provide false correction of certain of the colors when reproduced in monotone. Therefore, rebalancing of the tones is absolutely necessary to achieve logical distinction between the color values of the various objects. In the making of the color print previously mentioned this was scarcely necessary due to the compensation made by the various filters used to make the primary color separations. In the black and white print reproduced here, the highlights were brought out for additional contrast by penciling and chalking the groundglass substitute behind the film.
Data:
Camera: Zeiss Orix, 4x6 inches
Lens: Zeiss Tessar
Stop: f.16
Film: Agfa Superpan
Exposure: 8 seconds
Print: 14x17, direct
Paper: Tuma Gas
(Adolf Fassbender, 1937)