Child Worker - Adana

By Omar Ozenir

http://geldurkal.blogspot.co.uk/

Child labour is one of Turkey’s long-standing social problems. At least 6% of Turkey’s children between the age of 6-17 work in the industry - at an average of 50 hours a week! There are many reasons that force children to work under the harshest of conditions. For example, part of the public actually encourages the learning of a craft at an early age. Another important factor is poverty!

Unfortunately, contributing a small but vital portion to the meagre family income is offset by having  less, or even no time for school. Last but not the least, from the employers' viewpoint child labour is cheap and therefore exploited as much as possible.

During a summer holiday in my early teens, like many others of my age I also worked at a blacksmith in a derelict industrial estate in Adana, in the south of Turkey. To this day, I vividly remember the harshness of those two months in the sweltering heat. Years later, I returned to the same area with another intent: to photograph. For a week, I “worked” from dusk to dawn and documented life in the foundries and blacksmiths and numerous other workshops.

Some technical bits for the interested:
Leica M6 camera with a 35mm lens. Ilford Delta400 film. XTOL film developer diluted 1+1.

If you compare the neg with the print you’ll notice that I cropped from the right, top and bottom a wee bit to a 4:3 aspect ratio. In rapidly changing scenes it’s not always possible to frame the picture in an optimal way. In that case I don’t hesitate to crop - within reason - to get a better composition. Some photographers never crop as a rule. However, I don’t make a big fuss about that. Nevertheless, I try to print from the whole neg as much as I can…there isn’t much of a neg with 35mm film anyway.

Unfortunately,  I haven’t exposed the neg enough. Apart from the fire, the density and contrast in the  remainder of the picture is rather low. One more stop of exposure would have been better. Still, a high contrast grade of 4.5 with the diffuser head on my enlarger resulted in good tonal separation. Using test strips, I found that an exposure of 13 seconds gave me a good starting point for the final print. This is a straight print on fibre-based Ilford Warmtone paper with 13s at grade 4.5:

As you can see, in a straight print there is no detail whatsoever in the fire. This area needs significant burning in to reveal all the detail that actually exists on the neg. For this purpose, I cut a hole of similar shape in the middle of a piece of scrap FB paper and exposed just the fire for an additional 30 seconds (the red area in the print diagram below). This burning in exposure was done at grade 1. The ability to use different contrast grades on the same print is a huge advantage for multigrade papers. So why did I use a grade 1 filter here? Let me try to state a very important principle in one sentence:

Higher contrast filters affect darker tones more, lower contrast filters affect lighter tones more.

If I had tried to burn in the fire at grade 4.5, once I started to get detail in the fire the surrounding darker tones would have turned black and given away the game, because for such a shape the mask can never be perfect and there will always be some spillover to surrounding areas. But with a low contrast filter the surrounding areas aren’t visibly affected while detail in the fire starts to appear.

Moving on, in order to lead the eye to the centre, to the fire and the boy, I decided to darken the lower part of the picture. I gave another 7 seconds (50% of the main exposure) to the area below the blue line, and further 7 seconds below the green lines just to hold the corners in. To provide slightly better separation between the boy and the background  I dodged him quickly for about 1 second during the main exposure with a piece of blu-tac at the end of a thin wire (yellow area in the print plan). I didn’t arrive at the final print after the first try of course…I’m not there yet.

Every bit of dodging and burning in requires some trial and error, so if I’m lucky it’s only after the third or fourth attempt where I get everything the way I want it. I have long accepted that my darkroom work should not be about quantity. I decide on one neg or maybe two and then take my time (of which I don’t have a lot with a 4 year old boy running around) and see what I can do with them.

For this photo the print developer was Tetenal Eukobrom, which I love to use with warmtone paper.