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So I am Daiter’s before the crowd arrives, it is Franco and me and I want to see the work. I forgot what real photograph looked like and there were a lot of them.

While the Clarence John Laughlin were visually interesting they were not all that compelling as artefacts. They simply weren’t seductive.

Meanwhile the Art Shay’s were seductive as artefacts - I kept looking at the paper the tonalities, the gloss, the grain of the film – most of the images didn’t move me content wise. That is not fair more images were good in the show than some tenure tracked faculty produce in a lifetime – ten. The show however felt more like a time piece where we were to recognise people and revel in the past. The ones I preferred didn’t do that there were out of the time frame – sort of a continuous present.

Since I had time to look though I was caught up in the way the technique aided or hurt the images. In the Laughlin they hurt them in the Shays they helped.

Again I was reminded of the all inclusiveness of the medium and how now most of his images wouldn’t be made as the lens wasn’t sharp enough and the film too grainy. They were effective though. I also know that I am speaking from a future with more options but while I like progress – some wise arsed former student wrote me saying that come one we all love technology we just like to choose when we loved it – I want to keep all these options open.

I think my use of plastic cameras was to get back to the wonky les aesthetic that could be seen in some of the images. My use of older technology films and papers is to come to terms with the grain and deal with the quirks that used to be so prevalent and thus personal.

I kept staring so long that Paul came up and we started to chat. I mentioned that I couldn’t put my finger on it but the silver prints were so…( really I couldn’t explain what I was thinking) and while inkjets try to imitate it, there was something about the physicality of the Shay photographs that kept me staring.

His answer was there is something about precious metals that add to the worth – physically and metaphorically to a photograph.

Left it at that as by now the gallery was filling up – people were identifying all the famous people in the pictures.

That idiot savant – if he were a savant – Rich came up to say hello. Rich was the head of Shitty 2000 in which he scammed all this money from the owner of Land’s End to pay for a year long documentation of Chicago which ended up being worse than mediocre - it gave cliché a bad name – and ended up buried in the basement of some building at U.I.C. after he promised first the Historical Society, then the Cultural Centre, then Columbia College and U of C. He tried to shake my hand, while introducing himself. I pulled mine back and walked away.

He was toting a new digital SLR.