It was not the best time to be on the west coast. I had just gotten a gig in D.C. as a copywriter, although I think it was to remove the very young Communicating Arts, or its precursor, from the market, but the invitation to snatch myself away from the office came, and I got on the plane.
Probably every west coast tourist has something like this, the beautiful, big, imperfect and imperfectible sunset (with a seagull).
Scanned from the print, which went into a notebook with a lot of other print, I may one day find the negative.
It’s around here somewhere.
I’ve seen abandoned photographs referred to as “found treasures” (but in French), and they can be that, even not yet abandoned or dug out of one’s own old CD/DVD files.
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The little time I had there, I enjoyed, but the sense of being embattled and not transforming was there too. Although I spent a fair amount of “vacation” time poking around for work, such seemed even more byzantine back then then it might today. Then too, progress seems always to involve social process — getting to know People, being around long enough to become familiar and known — and I wasn’t there that long although, ever the writer, I did manage to cage a gig writing advertising copy against existing rolling stock for voice over. Nice.
Built in 2007 for “straight photography”, it has more capacity today (2.5-TB) and is a little more up to date with its software complement. Still, by about this time next year, it will be a 32-bit dinosaur, and the way things are going, I will probably still be living with it.
Had I, if I, focus primarily on writing, I could well revert to foolscap and a pen accompanied by short stints involving cloud-based manuscript typing.
This, however, is not the 19th Century, even as much as I enjoy living in its remnant by way of a gent’s library and a bit of imagination; the way back to that technological simplicity has been lost (barring, of course, the onset of global thermonuclear war).
With photography . . . the manual “FM3a” has had a roll of film in it for more than a year, and I’ve no idea what I was shooting when I put it back in its bag.
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Art making with cameras and computers has been funny all the way, of course.
Photography has had always in it a nostalgic longing and often reversion to earlier technologies even with latest technology throughput. That’s Doisneau walking around with a wooden box and tripod when he could have been carrying a 35mm like Bresson; it’s Sally Mann pushing herself through collodion processing but publishing Deep Southoff a modern enough press. Here’s an extension of that work by way of a treat on YouTube:
I doubt while apartment dwelling that I will return to film — no darkroom.
However, and in addition to old low-dpi scans on DVDs, there are boxes here packed with 35mm and (some) medium format negatives and transparencies, and I have scanners.
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I’m not so in love this morning with the multiple persona and their weaving journey in cyberspace: my studio, such as it may be, needs work!
Consequently, I will probably be more free on this blog to boast, post, commiserate, and experiment than on the other which needs to “pull” from whatever region may be defined by Mustang range x compensation.
That true 19th Century gent may have been both a product of aristocracy and creative writing: with some commitment to aesthetics and art making, I’ve been more the “bum o’ the family” and such has probably proven harder work — made even more difficult today by a cantankerous, dying (perhaps), and expensive printer — than anything else.
Just holding out, holding on, staying around, has been a brutal match.
Quite obviously, I would not have had it any other way.
J. S. Oppenheim -- All Together 