PHOTOGRAPHER CAPTURES AMERICA IN A BIG WAY
Published in Reel Chicago, March 2014
Manarchy inspects a negative from his customized camera
In a video describing his project, “Butterflies and Buffalo,” photographer Dennis Manarchy claims that it “will be the last major film project in history, literally the end of the film era.”
His words are backed by a dream and a machine as bold as the boast itself. “Butterflies and Buffalo” is a plan to journey through the most genuine of American cultures while taking souvenirs through the lens of what is arguably the largest camera in the world.
“Whenever you see any book on cultures,” he explains, “Americans are never included. “We don’t look that much different. Most of the world cultures that are featured are New Guinea, Africa, China, Mongolia. Truly outrageous regalia. I decided that the camera, having so much nuance, is the perfect way to show American culture because a normal looking person, you can enjoy their face because it’s photo realistic. It’s surreal.”
He plans to memorialize these American cultures with a custom built room sized brass and mahogany replica of an old fashioned bellows camera that produces a negative measuring up to six feet tall and travels on a modified farm trailer hitched to a Dodge 1500 V8.
He built it with a team of filmmakers, riggers and welders who spent thousands of hours fashioning chunks of raw material into a device that, according to a Dutch physicist who analyzed one of the negatives, captures 97,000 megapixels per image.
The end result looks like the main attraction in a steam punk circus.
“When you’re driving the camera through town… it’s just amazement. People love it.”
The startling appearance adds to “the whole spirit of the project,” which, Manarchy says, “is to make it interactive.”
Dennis Manarchy
“When we’re not photographing with the camera,” he says, “I think we’re going to have lunch in there. We’re gonna have fun with it. Sit on it. Walk through it.”
Manarchy adds a personal touch to this sense of community during portrait sessions. “I’ll do, whenever possible, a video interview of the person before I photograph them,” he explains.
“I say okay, now I want you to go back in your life somewhere and find a place that you want to be. Some place that has some profound effect on you… Your first child, your marriage… a war… But the secret will stay with you. Don’t ever tell me what you’re thinking about.”
Then he waits for a moment of “relaxation and a warmth that just washes them.”
His first trip with the camera was down to Louisiana, where he photographed Dewey Patene, a 65 year-old Cajun man who outran a deer, wrestled it to the ground and tried to kill it with a little thumb knife. “The deer knocked him out,” says Manarchy.
“They found him in a field laughing when he woke up.”
Since then, he’s shot a handful of portraits in his Chicago studio, displayed the camera and several of the images at Riverside Plaza and agreed to bring some of the works to Schaumburg’s Trickster Gallery this spring.
But these are mere preludes to the real journey, which he plans to launch from the South Sea Islands of South Carolina and take all the way to Alaska as soon as soon as the project receives adequate funding.
Check out “Butterflies and Buffalo” on Reel Chicago’s YouTube.