Out of sync

The Yanksgiving holiday has always been a time when I can get a lot of work done. With the added days off, I can multitask at will and have a preview of my working method when I can over look the North Atlantic each evening. I had made all the preparations, laid out the book of wander dealing with the Boston States. With my new prowess with black and white inkjet printing had a book of stasis ready to go along with a series of people made with the 10x8 that I couldn’t make into postcards as I didn’t know how to make a decent black and white inkjet, the negs scanned awaiting Thursday. I was also going to use the time off to try to catch up in the darkroom. I was focused. I knew what I wanted to print. I was chomping at the bit for class to end on Wednesday so that I could get started.

Ah but the week before I was making up for the time in New England and had forgot to place some orders – well every order. I had no inkjet paper for either book, no paper for the postcards portraits, no black and white photographic paper. I sat I paced. I became more frustrated as this week I am heading to Balamer – and the Ram’s Head in Annapolis but no further south heard tell that people on the other side of the Potomac can me mighty inhospitable – with all those boxes unopened.

A crisis of faith

I finally get the decision on the print that was sold via my evil twin on the rock to Chicagoans. It is a bright cold sunny day and thus perfect for making platinotypes. The one chosen wouldn’t have been one that I would have chose – did like it initially but – think that there are one that say the same thing better – and it is a bit difficult to print due to the someone fogging the film on its way from L.A. to St. John’s. I seem to be in the right frame of mind – am patient – only want two prints to come from the late autumn shortened day.

Things go better than I expected. I had given myself a week to make the prints it will be done in a day. Everything seems to click. The contrast was guessed correctly the basement – after the flooding – is just the right humidity. I even clean the glass on the contact printing frame. I have the print and a duplicate in only four tries. I am quite pleased with myself.

I head into school where it seems that for the anal retentive digital output class has acquired a set of piezography inks – inks that instead of having colour are 8 tones of grey making, supposedly impeccable black and white prints.

Tim asks if I have a black and white digital file. Why sure when do hateful photographers not have a black and white digital file on hand? It is pete’s at night – halfway through the tedious spotting process.

He takes a copy and at lunch I have this beautiful inkjet – no archival pigmented is more worthy – print. It is black and white not greenish black and white. The tone doesn’t change from light source to light source. I could never do that with my printer, I had given up on black and white and was halfway through a black and white silver print book of stasis when this happened.

I am hoping that someone will take me up on the platinotype of the month class so that I can buy the inkset.

I have seen students make great black and white prints with the colour sets in the 2400 that we have I simply couldn’t. Thought that I would try using what I had learned from the piezography experiment.

Lo and Behold!!!! While there was a difference with the snaps beside each other it was minor, and with a little adjusting the prints as good without spending money on a new inkset.

I decide to make a Yanksgiving Day card for Carol to see how it goes over. Likes the image. Likes the tonality. Wants to frame it.
Don’t bother I’ll make you a real print.

Another sunny perfect day I add to the Bonne Bay images and make a platinotype of the card I gave the day before.

She prefers the card over the platinotype. The tones are deeper, the paper stock is better the image seems to glow.

I start to protest but but but there is a subtlety to the platinotype, the shadows are more open but I am really trying to convince myself as the archival pigmented print – have to save face somehow – is more seductive.

So now what? When teaching Manipulated Pretensions, the best point of the class was the paper choice options that traditional photography didn’t allow. One could choose the process and the paper. Now that is shot as there are more inkjet paper options than gelatine silver paper options.

To the contemporary eye - trained and untrained - the images do look better, we won’t mention the gallery’s name but when I went into Schneider to show some of my platinotyped pinholes that was made into an artist book a couple of years ago she asked if they were inkjet. Now they look like bad inkjet. Or so I feel.

A crisis of nerves. How am I going to justify this image to people who don’t know what a platinotype is and will think it a bad photocopy. I make a gelatine silver contact print to see if it is better looking – only because it looks like a photograph should.

Carol chooses it.

I promised a platinotype – do I send the gelatine silver print with a wordy explanation? Do I send the platinotype with a wordy explanation?

In the end laziness comes through. I still liked the platinotype, I was bowing to societal ignorance in my doubts but really the gelatine silver print needed a lot of spotting. I sent the platinotype.

But what about my alternative process class, for years I told the students everything done in the class could be replicated easier on a computer, didn’t think that it would this soon that theory would become reality.

This changes everything. Instead of trying to commandeer the half basement at Martin and Gabrielle’s place for printing platinum -which could be a hard sell as there would be no water and in truth there is no room at Sullivan’s Loop that doesn’t have a window – I will now equip either that or the Pipe House with a scanner and a printer and away I go. I simply have to remember to call them archival pigmented prints.

Maybe it is in the DNA…

of photographers.

I am in Calumet Photographic - a rare thing now-a-days as there seems to be a crisis of identity with them – digital or wet and not really doing either well. I buy online as there seems to be more options. With wet, there are places who revel in odd papers and developers, I have to go online to buy anything for the platinotypes. With digital again the better prices for paper and inks are from office supply sites. I go into a camera shop for the same reason one goes into a convenience – I need it now.

I’m in there buying my Moab Kayenta paper and while waiting to check out, I see this beautiful 10x8 Zone VI camera – all clean and looking unused $1800 I want it. Why do I want it? I already have a camera that causes backache but nevertheless I drool. I go to look for used film holders as the pendulum swings toward the good ol days of working with it. I see myself tooling about two new nations of upper Québec and Labrador in the Saturn with it.

While looking for the film holders I run across a used Leica M6 - $1200 – don’t know what version, don’t really care. I want it even though I have a hard time reconciling 35mm, even though I have a hard time using the format. I see myself wandering urban areas with it – better yet I see myself back in Niterói , in the hotel in Ingá, with two rangefinders wandering the former capital more slowly than in 2001. Niterói is rife with crooked streets and things surreal. Days reacquainting myself, nights in butequins on the street having cold Antárticas watching the world go by. Trying to show some rationality I look at the new Zeiß Ikon ZM.

I now realise that I am the photographic equivalent of Billy Liar.

I am in a local Kenosha camera shop to buy some Dektol and looking in the used case I see a Nikon FM2 - $200…

all in all...

with a week of hindsight and some decent snaps – more the second - the hub doesn’t seem so bad. I know that it has to do with a diminished expectation but I did manage to focus enough to have a book of wander come from it.

Whenever I got the chance I was out making snaps simply wanting to get out of the house no matter the rain or that it was pitch black out.

Even with the security of carrying black and white I managed not to fall back on it – much – and dedicated the trip to colour. The grey days and the muted colours were my worse nightmare seeing colour as more specialised than black and white – colour of sky and time of day really don’t effect black and white the way I expected it to do with colour. Seeing the results of the rolls after I made scans from them as I cannot tell what anything looks like seeing colour negs, not only did I like the results but went straight away to editing a book of wander.

Staying north of the Hub influenced my outlook on the area. The large properties where the houses were well away from the road and all seemed uninhabited. The mix between the McMansions and the active decay of other houses that I saw a pull downs as soon as they were sold, had me using the same strategy of approach when I was in Cambridge – lots of foliage, objects implying habitation blurring property lines. Now being more aware of time of day and quality of light, they became something I looked for.

meanwhile...

A phone call from Carol's mum who is watching the cat in Peasants Pissoir. The water heater is broken and we now have a basement wading pool.

Wake up to another grey day but for the moment not raining. We are planning to go into the hub most likely Cambridge as Carol wants to go to bookshops around Harvard Square – it seems we need a destination. I want to get out.

I pack up Ziquinho – and being a coward – Joãozão the rest of the film and wait.

And wait.

It seems that everything takes an eternity as even though we have decided we have to agree a strategy for approaching Cambridge. Where will we park, what path will be take. Where we will eat. When we will eat. It seems that there is a problem even in walking. Should we? YES!!!!!

We can park near someone’s house in Inman Square get a visitor’s parking permit then walk – two miles oh dear – to Harvard Square.

This brings up the debate on whether they would like to come along more negotiations. Do they want to come along when do they want to come along, do they want to go with us now or go out for food when we come back.

Around noon we arrive. It seems that we are going to wander about Inman Square until the baby wakes up then we will head back, pick them up and head over to Harvard Square.

Fine with me, I just want to get out and Somerville has potential. Started with some New England formalism which is messier than that in Baltimore and dirtier than Chicago the lines aren’t as clean, it seems that urban pioneers here aren’t so anal retentive. It was the mixing of houses and front gardens that worked so well. Duplexes helped.

I missed alleys though. Every time I thought at I had found one it was simply a long driveway. Went on to photograph things. Madonnas of the bath tubs, piles in houses that looked abandoned. Basketball hoops, flags, the usual suspects. While it was damp and drizzly it was warm so while the rest tended to spend their time in a bookshop I went for these wanders.

Somerville also had potential due to the Portuguese speakers. While the area was definitely slanted toward Portugal there were enough Brasilian establishments to keep me happy. Combed some of the markets to find how well stocked they where and they had all the junk food I would need to kill the longing to be back, Guaraná Antártica, polvilho salgado.

I am happy. I am out and about making snaps and staring like an idiot. I am close using up my quota for the day in film and making up for what I hadn’t.

We are awaiting a baby to awake for the grand trek to Harvard Square. I wander the neighbourhood.

And wander.

And wander.

Finally we head out.

To eat at Bukowski’s

A misty grey day light waning and we will spend the rest of it in a restaurant.

Am constantly reminded of my vegetarianism as if it were difficult to find food in the early 21st century. I had a vegan meatball sandwich.

Mood darkens but had a great beer, Smutty Nose IPA and was allow to taste a Maine brew Gritty’s Black Fly.

The rain comes. Then stops. Then doesn’t let up.

It is dark so I am simply wandering to Harvard Square looking at all the snaps that could have been. I want to go to the newsstand which was my link to the outside world when I was an au pair in Brookline. Pick up the guardian. Look for a Jornal do Brasil.

Want a coffee.

The evening was mitigated by the Harvard Book Store. Simply the best bookshop I have been in a long time. so long that I had forgot what a non Boredoms type of shop was like. Thought longingly back to the old University Bookshop in Madison before it became the University Gift shop. Spent a lot of time drooling as I have to follow my rule of only buying a book when I finish one – and I had just bought REAL PHOTO POSTCARDS edited by Laetitia Wolff and a monograph on Pedro Meyer.

Still I bought STRANGE TALES FROM A CHINESE STUDIO by Pu Songling.

Past lives were proven past as Ferranti the camera shop was gone. Couldn’t find Underground Camera.

They found Au Bon Pain for coffee. Ah again forgoing all those local coffee shops for an overcrowded dirty national chain. Was in luck though too many people with the laptops to find a place to sit so saved we walked back in pouring rain – even so it was more enjoyable than trying to sit in Au Bon Pain – to 1369 Coffee House in Inman Square.

You could tell you were around MIT as the laptop score was PC 10 Macs nil.

You could tell I was with suburbanites by the comment used when people who didn’t fit the norm came in.

What a character – about one person who was dancing to Paul Simon and talking to himself.

Nice individual - about someone who dressed a bit differently

I was simply glad to have coffee.

Problem was it was only 7PM and even with the hour it took to say good-bye and a rush hour ride back north, there would be three hours of Bergman like conversation before one could make an excuse to go to sleep.

Sign of the day: WHOLESALE GOURMET PASTA.

I came here not expecting much. I brought Ziquinho and 15 rolls of colour film which - while that may be a lifetime’s supply for some – is only two days of mediocre wandering. I reckoned that the day of arrival would be a bust as would the day of departure. It seems that even my diminished expectations were too high for this trip.

Part of it is my fault, I was going to use this trip as an experiment in with colour but – as usual didn’t follow the rules that has worked so well for me in the past – don’t bring a safe option. I brought Joãozão and 15 rolls of black and white. It was this camera that was on my lap as we wandered through Cambridge heading for whatever Bostonians call suburbs. I made all these images that could have been part of the project if only I hadn’t played it safe.

In truth I don’t know how they will turn out as it seems that even though it was in the 60’s everyone was cold and they had child proofed the windows so that they wouldn’t open. I reckon that I could Todd Hido it.

To-day went to a rustic little bakery – Panera – to buy bagels and bread. Light drizzle but what I remember as New England colours muted, toward the darker end of the end of the spectrum.

Strange sign of the day “30 minute parking Police take notice.”

There was a potential snap where we stopped – somewhere between the Ace Hardware, the CVS pharmacy, a gas bar and the intersection of two main roads - but wasn’t lucid enough at the time to recognise it.

I wanted a New York Times but had resigned myself to reading it on line.

I needed coffee I had been up for 45 minutes and still no caffeine.

On the way back he put on a hip hop cd, nothing sadder than two late middle aged men listening to hip hop in a Honda Civic especially when one thinks that the Civic is a European performance machine and the roads in Northern Massachusetts are along the French Riviera. I was trying to concentrate on the scenery trying to get my bearings as one of the nice things about New England is that I can get lost. The curves of the roads require that I concentrate if I am ever to find my way back to a potential snap.

This is chalk up to too much time in the Midwest where all the parallel roads make one lazy. I don’t have to pay attention for a road going south always goes south so one only need to pay attention to the turns. After knowing the initial direction one was headed.

Here there is no assumption like that. I have to remember curves, position myself in relation to the sun – nonexistent so far. Even so I find that I am constantly fooled.

I realise why I haven’t got my coffee, all cups are made individually via an espresso machine, in which the beans are weighed out on a scales similar to the one used to weigh out chemistry for Maxim Muir’s Blue Black Developer. When he is finished I get a cup - Larger than a cafèzinho smaller than a decent cup. I down it and ask for another. Then another. Then I wait until he asks if I want another. Yes.

They area astounded thinking that I am going to climb the walls when so far I have had maybe one decent cup and the caffeine would come faster in an I.V drip.

The downpour starts so does the cabin fever, I start to pace. I find a room where I am as close to outdoors as possible – an anteroom which in most houses would be a mud room or a back kitchen if it were in the rear of the house, windows on all sides. I bring down the laptop and try to read the times on line. Cannot. Work on the website, then the slide’s –well Keynote presentation for Wednesday’s class then start to rant and pace.

The cabin fever is aided by the fact that whenever someone comes to a window they remark on the rain and how good it is to be indoors – think that we could be “indoors” in a motorcar where I could get a decent coffee.

Meanwhile in the rest of the house one has been preparing for a dinner party at six. They started at 10AM.

The good news, the rain stops. The bad it is 3PM and heavily overcast, the light will disappear by 4:30. I pack Ziquinho and seven rolls of film – talk about rampant optimism – and head out.

IT is warm out. too warm for the sweatshirt and scarf but I guess that I look suitably New England. The walk has potential as I find a giant tarred over circle with a basketball hoop in it. I work with the fact that houses seem to be lurking beyond property lines and in the trees, not so that they are really obvious but that you know that they are there.

Photograph things New England – the empty Busch Beer quarts in the verge by the fitted stone fences the steps leaning against trees. The abandoned houses. The placard announcing nothing.

The area is not suited for walking as the roads are barely wide enough for two cars much less someone too poor to own one. Saw only two others out and about, one was running the other seemed to have been forced by his dog. Saw a lot of cars though. Either I was desperate or there was a lot to be seen as I went through three rolls of film.

Walked until it was dark then turned around for round two of cabin fever. Mentioned that I found a path. A debate ensued on whether I would contract Lime disease or a poison ivy rash first. The dinner party had the computer crowd and the political whining bunch.

I drank.

The Boston States

We head over land and out into the ocean before the plane banks and heads into Logan, like the time I headed down the harbour through over the Narrows out to sea before the plane banked to land at the airport. Both times land disappeared but this time the implication of people didn’t there were boats, people jet ski-ing – yes in November what global warming?

While admittedly it was after midnight landing in St. John’s so nothing really could be seen the arrival was more dramatic - pitch black, the glow of the capital on the horizon then the city surrounded by darkness, even on the Avalon and the landing. Populations on the rock seemed so tenuous whereas in the hub humans were hinted at long before landfall here it is breakwaters, parasailing and gasometers.

Logan seems completely inhumane and the less said the better. I felt that I was being let off in a tunnel. I was trying to ignore it, hoping that being in New England would be close to the feeling of the Maritimes and thus one step removed from Atlantic Canada. Was clutching at straws – Tim’s, Irving Gas Bar, constant searching the number plates on the machines on I-95...

It didn’t. Driving north out of population – well driving north as there wasn’t a time when we weren’t out of populated areas – I was looking for those clusters of houses bunched around an independent village. What I found were single houses sounded by a lot of land, with strip malls. I didn’t feel like I was between places for there were always a house in view, nor did I feel like I was getting anywhere as there was never a town centre passed through.

There were exceptions, Ipswich, maybe Newburyport, but the later seem like it could have been anywhere.

An outing to the ocean at Crane Beach furthered the detachment as with the exception of a few spots along the Great Northern, Cow Head, land and sea are well separated and the water not friendly and welcoming at all.

There were hints of being somewhat close to the Atlantic Time Zone when the air smelled like northern pine forests with a hint of the damps leaves composting. Otherwise I could have been in Door County or Portugal Cove/St. Phillips or worse C.B.S.

We are so tantalisingly close to New Hampshire and Maine that I want to make a break for it.

I cannot say that Schneider doesn’t effect my thinking she does. When talking, she brings up the how much the works shown go for and whether they sell. Knowing that I cannot justify $1000 for a snap of mine nor can I guarantee that any will sell. I don’t push – and she doesn’t seem interested.

While Jim will tell me about shows of his that sell out, it doesn’t carry the same weight – this is due to the fact that it is usually over the third or fourth pint of Smithwicks in Clarke’s Beach or if you must Baird’s Cove at the Duke. He has, also, knowing full well my record -which is better up there than below the 49th parallel – asked if I want to have a show or curate one – four goes at the gallery since 1999 and one where he commandeered Duckworth Street.

This time though I want to make money for him. I am trying my best to curtail my usual manner of overfilling the space – and want to make six to eight large images 40x32 or 40 inches square – that can be sold for a decent sum while I see if the images hold up that size and since the gallery is know for painting see if they can hold up to that.

I am trying to limit the images to the ikonic. I am worried that they will read beautiful in a tourist board type of way as I photograph the same things. I have two sets of six to eight images picked out depending on how brave I am. Really brave and they will come from the work I did in Gros Morne, less so and it will be from my marling about the rest of the island.

It is hard to limit myself to six images. It is hard for shows are hard to come by and when I get one I want to show all the backlog – to which my evil twin says “Mies van der Rohe”. Hard because I like to build narratives with my misguided ikons. I like to contradict myself. I like to skirt issues. I cannot do that in six to eight snaps.

I am already hedging my bet thinking that yeah right I’ll have few images on the walls but I’ll have a book of platinotypes. Underlying all of this though is the wish to actually sell while using the space to experiment.

Later that same evening…

Another missive from the alcoholic in training with a link to a myspace site for godslastname. Link to it as I am curious and because what little I have had to do with myspace has baffled me as again it seems to be made for the a.d.d. cyberspace.

Imagine my surprise when I see two of my snaps next to the downloads for two songs.

I am supposed to be outraged but I slip into third person mode and want to do some sluthing. Also due to the condescension of Schneider I like how the world seems to go through Pouch. The band say there are from pouch, but none of them look familiar. They don’t even look like the lads of summer who are up there when the residency is in full swing.

The picture behind doctor looks familiar sort. could that be Martin and Gabrielle’s place? Read their bios and they are Upper Canadians from T.O who came to the rock via Kingman’s Cove.

OK there are six houses in Kingman’s I know two of them and they don’t look like the people the Tibbos would hang out with.

But Hansen would, he is from Toronto, likes music – jazz more his style and Mike has a link to Pouch as the only person I know who has skied Cape St. Francis – he was also the first person I met when I first did the residency in 1999.

Knowing Hansen and moving up to Pouch means that only one person could be involved and yes it ended back where it started with my evil twin, who came up with the name, put them up at the pipe house and wrote one of the songs. Love it when this happens, these tenuous links to the rest of the world.

Am late heading over to Schneider gallery for an opening. Even though she represents me my ever getting into another show there much less having an individual one is as close as some tenure track faculty actually making more than one image a year.

Haven’t been in the gallery in over a year, half due to the fact that I haven’t really been in River North in about that time, not true I haven’t been in the gallery because I haven’t been in the gallery.

Walking over – well racing as I wanted to get on the 6:31 train – forgoing all the potential snaps that I saw on the way, I played with the all the retorts I could come up with to somehow have her at least thinking. She scoffs at my adopted province, a gallery and a website at the edge of the world, not realising that that website at the time wordplay got 10 000 hits a month and location is nothing in the cyber world.

Mentally made notes of all the rockbound doings to blurt out when she asked.

She didn’t. The gallery was empty as I keep forgetting to come fashionably late – all these people at the art school to end all art schools said that they were heading over but when I got there the gallery was empty, the plastic wine cups still in neat rows as one walked in.

The show looked great, the whole space was to devote to the work so that it didn’t have to compete with pottery, or peripherals. There was space around the images – but that could have been due to the fact that the gallery looked more like a Tuesday than a Friday opening – again I am sure that this is to me treating galleries the way that seniors treat dinner – but I doubt that there is an early bird special with art.

Left to make the train but not before hitting Daiter – better food and a nice show that I have to bring my class to as it was all about first edition books and the translation from photograph to print. Spent some time babbling to Paul, Stephen and Michael about the show and books, Stephen gave me some pointers when he realised that I didn’t buy books for investment but to look at – trade-em and get the ones you like.

Again I realise that my tastes are out of sync with my department but I like going to Daiter not only to have some perspective of what photography was, but also because they speak to me fully knowing that I cannot afford anything in their space.

Left feelling better and with time, so out came Ubaldo while walking to the train and, a roll later, I board the 6:31.

Checking my email when I get home a message from my evil twin in Pouch the book of platinotypes was well received – a book that will end up in Michigan via the rock.

He also forwarded a message from his daughter in Toronto that was forwarded from a friend of hers. She – the friend - wants to buy a print of mine that she saw on the website, mentioned by my twin and his living DNA sample, for two friends of hers who live in Chicago.

A slight smirk as James Baird is shutting out Schneider everything in what little I have sold has been through him.