Date: Fri, Apr 2, 1999, 10:34 PM

Dear Mr. Meyer,

I just discovered Zone Zero this evening and found it to be very interesting. Your comments on self-portraiture made me think of the nudes that the photographer John Coplans has been making of himself over the last decade. He is a friend of a friend. In order to see what he is doing he sets a video camera near his 4 x 5 so that it, essentially, frames the same view as the film camera. By watching the video output on a TV screen, he can see what he's doing.

When I first saw the Coolpix 900 I thought to myself, "Here's John's whole system wrapped into one compact unit". I've become very interested in digital photography and have ordered one of the first Nikon Coolpix 950 cameras since it will allow me some manual control over lens openings, shutter speed and focus. (The images I saw from the Fuji DS-330 were dissapointing.)

After many years of printing for myself and other photographers (mostly large format) I'm intrigued by the freedom of digital photography. For the last several years I have been working (with a traditional rangefinder) on a series of portraits made in the subways of New York City and Budapest, Hungary. The idea, of course, came from Walker Evans' similar project almost 50 years ago and has been nourished by my contact with Helen Levitt, who has given valuable feedback on many of the work prints.

I've assembled some of these subway portraits on a web site but it is incomplete and the sequencing has not yet been finalized. As I do not currently own a film scanner, the pictures were scanned from prints on a simple flatbed scanner so they are somewhat primitive. Then again, they were shot at 3200 ASA (by necessity) and thus are sketch-like even as silver prints.

They can be found at

I look forward to following the progress of Zone Zero.

Yours,

Sean Reid

P.S. A typo on your "feedback" page: received was accidentally spelled as recieved