This could be a long one but I’ll do my best to be brief.
My wife has an incredible collection of family furniture. Originally Scottish, some of the family wound up in Montreal where they were prominent engineers involved in, among other things, the building of the earliest canals along the St. Lawrence. Wealth followed and a mansion was built somewhere around the year 1800. The family had furniture built specifically for this home, sourcing the wood from as far as South America.
I’ll pause here to say that I’ve yet to entirely read the massive volume of family history that is somewhere among our packed belongings and I haven’t done any real research on this information. But, family lore has been passed down and I’m repeating it here. Hopefully I’ll get at least some of it right.
Not long after the construction of the mansion in Montreal, it burned. To the ground. But not before the servants were sent inside to save a few pieces of furniture including a large gentleman’s press (like a combination wardrobe and dresser), a gaming table, a foot stool and an enormous gilded mirror. In the following years, the family’s fortune disappeared but these few pieces of furniture survived and were dutifully passed from generation to generation. For the last 20 or so years, they’ve been in our possession.
The 200-plus years haven’t been entirely kind. We had the table restored a few years ago and, when it came time to move last year, we decided to deliver the gentleman’s press to the restorationists for its turn. It’s big — really big — and we figured that we could move it fewer times this way.
To make a long story short, it’s been there for a few months now and we’ve visited from time to time to consult on the details of the work. We made another stop yesterday and I decided to bring the camera along to record the progress. The piece had become nearly black with age and this trip would be the first where we would see a few of the parts with the build-up removed and the original glow restored.
Suffice it to say that they are doing an incredible job. I was photographing a few of the resurrected parts like this door bracket, marveling at the glow and depth of the wood grain when…
I got distracted.
Did you notice the texture of the table that the woodwork is sitting on? I’ve been a semi-obsessed collector of textures for decades. They are part of an ongoing project of mine and this work surface was a gold mine. The restorationist probably thought I was nuts as I began to photograph the table top instead of the fruits of his restoration efforts. In the end I had over a dozen textures with a wide variety of tones and color like this:
It may not look like much but — trust me — this kind of layered surface isn’t easy to find. What do I intend to do with them? Well, I’ve long been working on a series of artificially aged images that involve textures like these overlaid on other images to create the look of a worn and aged photo. I’ll post more of these later and plan an entire gallery on my site but here’s an example from last Fall’s trip to China:
The original of this image can be seen here.
See? There was a photography-related aspect to this story after all. I’ll post more of my texture experiments later and, when the gentleman’s press finally arrives, I’ll post a before and after of it as well.
Just goes to show you — always take your camera.
