The North Miami Board Of Adjustment Before Michelle Garcia Got Appointed To The Board

About a year ago Mario Flores asked me to exhibit at his gallery, which would be directly across 125th St. from City Hall if it wasn't actually like a store front north of the corner on 8th Ave. I started digging out prints of Miccosukee and Seminole Indians from the 1970's, pictures of rock groups and Love-Ins at Greynolds Park from the 1960's, photographs of half naked young chicks who are now sixty-something grandmothers, all what the collector market refers to as "vintage prints", prints made all those years ago and not recently printed from old negatives.

Mario said "Very nice, but how about doing something new, something different, something creative!" He still wanted to show some of the older work, but now I had me a project to do! Oh thrill. I'd been shooting black and white here and there in the past couple of years. I had big zip-lock bags full of still to be developed film cluttering up the fridge to prove it.

One of those rolls had this photo of myself (on the right) that I shot with that ultra-wide 15mm Heliar lens as I sat there at a board of adjustment meeting. I had fun(?) trying to get just the correct parts of the image to develop with my new found technique of dribbling developer from my finger tips onto the exposed enlarging paper, tilting it this way and that to get those drops to run across the surface. Maybe one out of ten came out OK, a phenominal waste of money at about a buck and a half a sheet, but Mario was happy and the exhibit a success.

So there we were a row of mostly ugly (except me, of course) older guys. Only two of us had our faces where the developer happened to run. Michelle was still a couple of years away from her board appointment, otherwise you can be damned sure that I would have dribbled freshly mixed Dektol developer all over her face!