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!

A View Of Peru ~ Mario Flores Gallery

It was the last Friday of the month and all of the art galleries in North Miami were holding openings for new exhibits, followed by an outdoor jazz concert in front of MOCA, the Museum Of Contemporary Art. My neighbor Janis wanted to go along. She's deaf but it seems that she can hear the beat of the music and she likes to look at the art work. She also likes the cookies, cheese and crackers, and fresh strawberries in the galleries. She'd been in Mario's gallery about six months ago when I had a show there so that was our first stop.

Mario is an excellent photographer himself, and commercial photography is what he does for a living, yet somehow he'd had the gallery for six months and had yet to show any of his own work. This was different. He's from Peru and he has a huge collection of images that he's shot there. This show was photographs by Mario, photographs made in Peru! I wanted to get a shot that made the gallery and the show look interesting. If you want to see Mario's photographs visit the gallery at 12502 N.E. 8th Avenue in North Miami.

Janis and I checked out a couple more galleries before we heard the music start. We found some seats and enjoyed the concert.

The Pictures Are Up, The Doors Are Open!

It was opening night of the group photography exhibit at the Mario Flores Gallery. That's Mario over on the right standing next to some of his color prints, arm raised as he paid hommage to a guy who is without a doubt the greatest photographer in South Florida. At least that's how I look at myself.

Mario's wife Stephanie, center, was supposed to be taking photos of the opening festivities with that Nikon DSLR in her hands, but with Mario and myself bantering back and forth with one another ~ we were on a roll! ~ she couldn't keep from cracking up. Fortunately, with modern marvels such as "image stabilization", the camera was able to keep sharp almost as many photos as were out of focus because the "auto focus" picked the wrong thing upon which to focus (yup, that IS the correct grammar). Anyway, I stopped by the gallery, saw her photos, and my main gripe was that she hadn't shot enough of/with me.

I made the mistake of mentioning to Mario that I had posed for a painting by Wilma Siegal, a Fort Lauderdale artist, a couple years back. I should run a picture of the painting here in the blog! Anyway, now Mario wants me to pose for some pictures. He says that I have an "interesting face". Next Wednesday is the Big Day.

On The Wall At The Mario Flores Gallery

The opening party was last Friday and there were actually a lot of people there but I managed to chase a few away from in front of my display of photographs long enough to actually see the pictures in the shot. No, Phil Morris wasn't "posed", but he was already looking at the photos before I tried to get this shot. He lingered afterwards for quite awhile and we chatted a bit. He seemed most interested in the photos of the Miccosukee and Seminole Indians. Most people are.

I was the only one showing traditional black and white gelatin silver prints, and frankly some of the other photographers' work was, to me anyway, stretching the definition of photography a bit more than I'm comfortable with. Still, Mario has been encouraging me to go off exploring some new directions with my black and white photography, which seems to be getting me out of the rut I've been stuck in the past few years. It's still gelatin silver though.

This photo was shot with a 21mm Super-Angulon on a Leica M3, scanned off of a 4"x6" print.