Golden Age of the Silver Screen: Jennifer Mohr

This week on The All Worlds Traveller, we feature the next subject in our (ongoing?) Golden Age of the Silver Screen series. Past visitors to The All Worlds Traveller and Distant Era in general may recognize Jennifer Mohr, one of our most photographed subjects and collaborators. Actor, costume designer, teacher, clown, Jen does it all. If you’re anybody who’s anybody in Chicago theatre, you either know Jen, or you’re soon to meet her.

Jen was originally slated for the first run of Golden Age of the Silver Screen last December, but juggling a dozen other projects, she wasn’t able to schedule it. This summer, we made up for lost time when Jen came over to help test a new photography light.

The Fresnel

From the very beginning of the Golden Age of the Silver Screen project, I’ve wanted to shoot with hard light modifiers similar to the ones used in Hollywood’s golden age. I started with a magnum reflector—a modifier that resembled an old Mole Richardson focusing scoop. But the old fashioned Hollywood light I most wanted to try was a fresnel.

In June, I finally had the opportunity to try this light for the first time. When Jen and I shot together, I had no idea what the light “did” or what to do with it.

Over the course of our time shooting together, we learned that the fresnel works like a lighthouse lens, focusing a beam of hard light. This beam can be widened and narrowed by adjusting the lens on the light. It can also be modified by moving the attached barn doors to allow or restrict light.

Unlike the other hard light modifiers I’ve used, with a fresnel I can keep the light in the same place and subtly adjust it to create a completely new look. Closing a single barn door, for instance, can change the background from white to black.

Left: Barn doors open (white background).
Right: Barn doors adjusted to restrict light (white background).

There’s also a unique quality to the fresnel that I can’t quite put my finger on. It has to do with the way the fresnel interacts with the subject and skin, but I need more experience with it to make a coherent statement.

Jen brought a simple look, which we shot with the fresnel during our experiments before we switched over to using the optical spot to project a background pattern. I can’t remember whether we used the fresnel for the main light in those images. In any case, we had a great experimental session trying out the fresnel. I’m keen to experiment further!

As ever, a thousand thanks to the exceptional Jen Mohr, for her time, talent, and friendship.

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Steven Townshend is a fine art/portrait photographer and writer with a background in theatre, written narrative, and award-winning game design. As a young artist, Steven toured the US and Canada performing in Shakespeare companies while journaling their moments on paper and film. In his transition from stage to page, Steven continued to work as a theatre photographer, capturing dramatic scenes while incorporating elements of costume, makeup, and theatrical lighting in his work. Drawn to stories set in other times and places, Steven creates works through which fellow dreamers and time travelers might examine their own humanity or find familiar comfort in the reflections of the people and places of a distant era.