TOP: COURTESY OF THE HARWOOD MUSEUM
I called him to see if he was interested in coming out to see it. We bought it together to make our scenes work.” And work they did. Bell and Foster purchased what had been a large commercial laundry, along with an adjacent 28-room medical clinic. After making considerable changes and additions, they successfully carved out the separate studios and living spaces they still occupy today. “Gus is a big guy who does big things,” says Bell. With camera in hand, Foster embarked on a series of Herculean journeys—15 years of mountain-climbing adventures that culminated in the acclaimed American Rockies series, a 300-mile walk on Japan’s Tokaido Road, 4,000-mile cross-country treks, and travels throughout the U.S. to document food production. The latter journey resulted in the American Cornucopia series, one photo of which takes an oddly beautiful view of a slaughterhouse reminiscent of Chaïm Soutine’s carcass paintings. Experimenting with a 35 mm Globuscope camera that makes a 360-degree revolution in .8 second, Foster also developed a captivating series of “time photographs” that, he says, tell a short story by capturing up to 2.5 seconds of elapsed real time in an elongated narrative print. While much as been written about Bell’s nine-ton vacuum tank and other unusual lablike equipment, it turns out that nearby in Foster’s studio, similar “weird science” explorations were also underway. In order to print his color images on the scale he wanted (as large as 3 feet high by 16 feet wide), Foster designed and built a one-of-a-kind enlarger to achieve otherwise traditional darkroom processing. Referred to as “the octopus,” this massive contraption moves back and forth on wheels and a track system, has an 11-pound German-optics lens and an optical bench once used to calibrate scientific instruments at Los Alamos National Laboratory, and harnesses 3,000 watts of light, in contrast to
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15 YEARS OF TREND MAGAZINE | SUMMER 2014
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