Bill Cox

Male model, Bill Cox, in Sydney c. 1974

This image is available as a limited edition of 20 giclée prints, see shop

Bill Cox was a male model who I met during a visit to Geoff Dauth’s Surrey Hills studio in Sydney, in about 1974. Geoff did a lot of photography of fashion and various retail applications, and Bill was well suited to much of that work.

At that stage, I was experimenting with Kodak’s 2475 Recording Film, which was the fastest emulsion available, at 1,600 A.S.A. (I.S.O.). By comparison, Kodak’s famous Tri-X film was rated at 400 A.S.A.. At the date of this writing (November 2019), Canon have just released a digital camera which shoots at an astounding 4,000,000 I.S.O.! It can shoot at high shutter speeds in moonless night conditions, which was an impossibiliy in analog days.

Bill had such an interesting face, so I asked if he would mind if I shot some portraits of him. Using a single 500 watt lamp in an old Barton reflector, with some tracing paper over the front, I asked Bill to tell me a story about anything dramatic which had happened to him recently. He launched into a complex story about someone who had been causing him some grief, as I shot off a roll of 2475.

The film was developed in Kodak HC-110, and the print was made on Agfa TP6-WP, which was an extremely high-contrast, resin-coated paper. This combination made the grain of the film most apparent. In analog terms, the slower the film, the less grainy the result, and vice-versa. Films such as Kodak’s Panatomic-X, at 25 A.S.A. were virtually grainless.

Unfortunately, the negatives were destroyed by floodwater, so I had to photograph the only surviving print to produce this digital result.