SEATTLE – WIDESCREEN 1992

Typical! My first ever visit to the States and as I was about to take my first shot of the trip the shutter jammed on my old Nikon FE . I know! Nikon FE’s don’t (or didn’t at least) jam – yet somehow mine did, and the only thing I could afford as back-up was a disposable Kodak. To add to my irritation, it turned out I had inadvertently purchased a wide-angle disposable Kodak. Never having used any kind of disposable camera I was ignorant of the fact that there was a choice of lens configurations and had just picked up the first one I saw on the shelf of the corner shop. Looking at theses images now however, more than 20 years later, I think that it was a happy set of accidental circumstances. There’s something appealingly technicolor and fresh about this basic Kodak film, and the wide views of fabulous Seattle and its environs have an almost Robert Burks-like cinematographic quality (Burks created the look of most of Alfred Hitchcock’s American-made movies). Ultimately I think they capture a sense of vivid “Americana” which I’ve struggled to repeat on all my subsequent visits to the US, with far superior cameras…