Two years ago, I had an over-exposed film from a pinhole camera test shooting with a friend of mine, Sarah. Since her face was shadowed and the sky in the background was far too bright to be able to print properly, I had to invert the film, compensating its extreme contrast at the same time. But of course, it was not aimed to reverse the whole image, because otherwise, the outcome will simply show a negative picture on paper. What I had to do, without using masks or digital aid, was to merely convert the high density area and not her face, so that she would appear as normal on the print. After some thoughts and a few tests in the darkroom, I decided to use solarization, or to be more precise, the Sabattier-effect.

The result was satisfactory and even more, probably through the distortion and exaggerated proportion caused by the wide angle of the pinhole camera, the printed image reminded me of a sequence in "Alice in Wonderland", where Alice suddenly grew as high as a house. The contours of the trees behind her were now glowing bright, while the sky turned its colour perfectly to the mid-gray keeping the original range of blue. And her eyes, with their emphasized large sizes due to the close distance to the camera, lead me to the song that John Lennon and Paul McCartney wrote in 1967; "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds".

I remember reading somewhere that John Lennon was inspired by his sonʼs drawing for writing this song, but I have never seen this picture anywhere. Would these photographs of Sarah happen to have any similarities to his illustration of Lucy? It has always been just an imagination in my head how the artwork by little Julian would look like, and I donʼt even know if it still exists. In any case, it would have been very likely drawn in colours, I imagine, perhaps bright ones, as often seen in the sketches by the children. The assumed influence of Lennonʼs drug use on the lyrics seems rather irrelevant to me, but the vivid colours described in the song text remain as an unsolvable issue, for me and my black and white negatives.

— March 2020