The Jazz Player?

Barry University was one of my biggest clients for about twenty-five years. I watched and documented the change from an all girls Catholic college to a fully integrated co-ed university.

At this point I have no clue as to who the pianist might have been, whether she was a lay teacher or one of the sisters who'd opted to stop wearing the white habits they'd all worn when I first started there. For some reason the public relations director wanted photographs of her. I liked this one the best.

It was taken in November, 1989 on Kodak T-Max 400 film with a Leica M2 and 35mm f/2 Summicron lens.

Barry College Chapel on the cover of their alumni magazine Barry Mark

Senator Pepper

I guess this was about twenty or twenty-five years ago, about the time when Barry went from calling itself a college to calling itself a university. Barry is a few miles south of where I live and I did all of their photography for about twenty-five years. One of the reporters at the North Dade Journal left the newspaper for the position of public relations director at Barry College which at the time was a Catholic girls school. I'd been working with her for a few years at the paper and she started to call me to shoot events at Barry.

Senator Claude Pepper was the Grand Old Man of North Dade County politics, and he was always willing to speak someplace about something. If it had anything, anything at all about what was going on, he knew everything about it and was only too happy to step up to the podium. I have no idea what was happening this day but I suspect that it was the groundbreaking for the new library, based on the background. Claude Pepper had no doubt been instrumental in getting a few million dollars of public funding to help with the project. I'd photographed the senator on dozens of occasions and he thought it was an OK idea. I set the camera and handed it off to somebody ~ CLICK! ~ and this was the result

This was about the time that I'd decided that damnit! if I was going to be taking everybody's photo being pals with the bigwigs I wanted to start getting some pix with me also. Now that the good senator is no longer around I can't put him in charge of the white hair, nor can he put me in charge of the brown hair, like we used to do in the old days. Now I wear a mixture of both in memory of a great man.

From Barry University To Rootz Gallery

Here I am with Mario Flores at his Rootz Gallery a few weeks ago. Most of these prints are well over thirty years old. As I was digging them out of my files I ran across a lot of old magazines and advertising brochures featuring my photographs. A lot of that dated back to the period of twenty-five or so years when I did all the photography for Barry College (now Barry University) in nearby Miami Shores.

Claudia, my ex-wife called me a few days ago to tell me that her friend Ann had passed away. I knew Ann from back in the days when she worked at Barry, long before I'd met Claudia. A memorial sevice for Ann will be held Friday morning in the chapel and Claudia wanted me to know. She and I will go there together, but I also want to take a few photographs around the campus while I'm there.

The school has grown a lot over the past twenty-five years. I thought that it might be interesting to photograph some of the same buildings and scenes as they look today and put them here on thepriceofsilver along with the images from those old publications.

I also want to visit the school library. They have several of my prints included in their collection, and they're framed and on display in the library. They're from my Miccosukee Indian series. I'd like to get some photos of the prints hanging in there. Claudia is going to tell me that I'm on campus for a memorial service and to return some other time to take my pictures. Then she's going to yell at me for not getting a haircut. Some things never change.

Off On A Tangent / Ignoring The Photograph

I was driving home a few minutes ago thinking about how I was going to pull off writing about a photography exhibit when Todd would have already posted a picture of I knew not what. The pictures that I took tonight are on that old fashioned stuff, film, nowhere near ready for posting on the web. Most of them are still in the camera on a half shot roll.

Momkette was thrilled that this picture was posted, and ecstatic that I wasn't planning on writing about it because neither Monkette nor I can remember who that guy was wearing the black outfit, or where it was, but I do have vague recollections of thinking that it'd been years since it was fashionable to put metal venetian blind slats in the chain link fence fabric like that. Of course Monkette just likes to see herself featured here on the blog.

Tonight was the last Friday of the month which means the monthly "Jazz at MOCA" concert outdoors on the plaza next to city hall and in front of the Museum of Contemporary Art. The museum was open also. Frankly I wasn't too impressed with tonight's jazz group. To my uneducated ear it seemed that one or another of the instruments was off key much too frequently to ignore. Another problem was the occasional screeching feedback from the amps. After an hour of that I decided to see what MOCA had to offer. A good decision it turned out!

It was a photography exhibit by nearby Barry University's master degree candidates. The work was mostly all conventional black and white images, shot on traditional black and white film and printed on traditional gelatin silver enlarging paper. Amazing, huh?

Lucrecia Diaz showed some 16 X 20 images of people from the Key Biscayne police and fire departments. Summer Wood chose to go small with photos of perhaps 6 x 6 inches shot with Ilford Delta 400 120 roll film. You could see the entire negative and a bit of the film around the image, which is how I know which film was used. This printing style is common with 35mm negatives but I don't recall ever seeing it done with 120 roll film before. The third person who worked in a conventional manner was Thomas Daniel Burnkel, who had some almost abstract images of melaleuca trees, an Australian tree that has taken over large areas of the Everglades.

The other two photographers were too off beat for my tastes. One had multiple little square B&W prints glued to curved sheets of aluminum. The other consisted of wooden boxes constructed of random scraps of unfinished plywood mounted on the wall. A "window" on one end let you look inside, but I still haven't figured out exactly what we're supposedly looking at.

MOCA is on 125th Street between N.E. 7th and 8th Avenues. Free parking is available on lots to both the east and west of the museum. The show runs through May 11. Check out some great traditional black and white photography if you're near the area.

Councilman Scott Galvin read the above and emailed me "cute! I shared it with Bonnie Clearwater :)" Bonnie is the head honcho (honcha? honchette?) at MOCA.

As we read Scott's email Monkette suddenly piped up "Isn't that your cousin Larry Shapira? Don't you remember a few months back when he and Margie were down visiting some of her relatives and we met up with them for brunch?" Maybe I'd do better if it was MY head that was stuffed with cotton.