Technical Information

When I began shooting on Telegraph I was still using a Pentax Spotmatic camera and a Pentax clone. (One of my favorite lenses was the Pentax Super Takumar 85mm f/1.9.) I had been shooting in black and white for the underground press for several years, mostly for the San Francisco Express Times, and for some time I had been waiting for an event I could shoot entirely in color. I wanted to be able to send a body of color work to a well-known New York photo agency, Black Star. In May of 1969 the People’s Park episode began and I felt from its beginning that this would be it. I was right. Immediately after a demonstration that evoked a particularly brutal response from the police (one bystander killed and another permanently blinded) I sent a large number of color slides to Black Star. This resulted in a three-and-a-half page spread of my work in Paris Match. It also resulted in a royalty check that enabled me to dispense with the Pentax equipment and buy a couple of black Leica M4 camera bodies and several Leitz lenses. (Now I was a real photojournalist, using the same camera as Cartier-Bresson!) So, by far the greater part of the Rag Theater project was shot with Leicas.

As for film and developer, after playing around with various combinations I settled on Ilford FP4 film developed in Paterson’s Acutol FX-14, a killer combination. I would say that around two-thirds of the work was done with these products. I made prints on the classic Agfa Portriga Rapid paper, this while the emulsion still contained cadmium, a toxic element the use of which was later discontinued (to the great detriment of print quality).

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