Duomo di Milano
The cathedral of Milan
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Galleria di Milano
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We had lunch here!
Poldi Rossella Claudio
Poldi: During my senior year I was an exchange student and traveled to Italy to spend the school year with a host family in a town not far from Milan. It was an exciting time, and on a weekend in the fall, my host sister Rossella, her boyfriend Claudio, and I took the train to Milan to go sightseeing and shopping. A street photographer happened to take our picture, which I thought would be fun to send to my boyfriend Ned back home.
Ned and Thor Lafayette
T: Poldi’s boyfriend Ned was my best friend in high school. As you can now imagine, Ned was thrilled to receive a letter that included this photo from his girlfriend. He wanted to respond with something, so he asked me if I would help stage a similar photo that he could send back.
Ned had some great ideas. We didn’t have a cathedral for a backdrop, but the nearby Lafayette Country Club had unique architectural features. It didn’t have a flock of pigeons at large, but we would substitute wooden duck decoys. Shopping bags, magazines, umbrellas? No problem.
I set up a camera and took photos of us with our props using a mechanical shutter- release self-timer (an origin of the term “selfie”). I brought the film back to my darkroom, developed it and then made prints. It struck me that this was not quite a match to Poldi’s photo—we were only two subjects; hers had three.
So at a time decades before digital photos existed and “photoshop” became a verb, I set about to “transplant” Claudio’s image from one photo to another. It involved actual cutting and pasting, with Xacto knives and real paste, and re-photographing the composite, but it provided just the right result!
Ned had some great ideas. We didn’t have a cathedral for a backdrop, but the nearby Lafayette Country Club had unique architectural features. It didn’t have a flock of pigeons at large, but we would substitute wooden duck decoys. Shopping bags, magazines, umbrellas? No problem.
I set up a camera and took photos of us with our props using a mechanical shutter- release self-timer (an origin of the term “selfie”). I brought the film back to my darkroom, developed it and then made prints. It struck me that this was not quite a match to Poldi’s photo—we were only two subjects; hers had three.
So at a time decades before digital photos existed and “photoshop” became a verb, I set about to “transplant” Claudio’s image from one photo to another. It involved actual cutting and pasting, with Xacto knives and real paste, and re-photographing the composite, but it provided just the right result!
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P: As you now know, life took us along different paths, and four decades later I am showing Thor the wonderful things in Milan, with my Italian sister Rossella that I have kept up with all these years. Thor still had fond memories of that photo, and thought it would be fun to recreate the scene in front of the Milan Duomo. And so we did.
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Poldi Rossella Thor bw
T: Yes, I had to play the part of Claudio. I don’t think I have sent this picture to Ned though.
