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 too dark and the sky in the background too bright to print properly, I had to reverse the film, compensating its extreme contrast at the same time. But of course, not the whole image, because otherwise, the print will simply show a negative picture on paper. What I had to do, without using masks or digital aid, was to reverse the image except her face, so that she would look normal on a 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, the printed image reminded me of a sequence in "Alice in Wonderland", where Alice suddenly grew as high as a house, probably through the distortion and exaggerated proportion caused by the wide angle of the pinhole camera. The trees behind her were now glowing bright, while the sky turned its colour perfectly to the mid-gray keeping its original density 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 son’s drawing for writing this song, but I have never seen the drawing anywhere. Would these photographs of Sarah happen to have any similarities to his drawing of Lucy? It has always been just an imagination in my head how this drawing by little Julian would look like, and I don’t even know if it still exists. In any case, it would have been very likely drawn in colours, perhaps bright ones, I imagine, as often seen in the children’s drawings. The assumed influence of Lennon’s drug use on the lyrics seems rather irrelevant to me, but the vivid colours described in the song text remain as an unsolved issue, for me and my black and white negatives.

— March 2020