The Teamsters And An Art Gallery ~ Neighbors

The word teamsters seems to conjure up images of big burly guys driving big rigs cross country, eighteen wheelers, big Macks and long horn Petes, and the smell of diesel exhaust. You'd hardly imagine that the headquarters of Local 769 would be in this newly renovated building in downtown North Miami. Right across the street is my dentist's office and thirty yards beyond that will get you seated at Jimmeys Place for a great meal.

Just to the left of the Teamsters is where Jaybo Photo was for years, a photo lab and photo supply. After several years of sitting vacant it's now home to Mario Flores Photography and his Suyu Gallery, which shows a variety of types of art including photography. I'll be showing some of my work there starting Saturday night.

I'm fascinated by shadow patterns, and under the word Teamsters is a circle of light on the wall criss-crossed by shadows of branches, sort of mirroring the stylized wheel in the Teamsters logo to its left.

Another day without a picture...

This morning I took a few of my new prints over to the Suyu Gallery to get some feedback from Mario. He loved them and he plans to show several of them along with some of my older work. Believe me, the new stuff doesn't look anything at all like my older work! Mario said that he'd never seen anything like it before. He wanted to know how I got those effects. I ain't giving away my secrets, no way!

Now in addition to Todd and Monkette getting on my case to spend more time printing in the darkroom I'll have Mario bugging me also.

We're cutting back the schedule of posting photos on the blog to three days a week. There should be another one posted tomorrow. Whether I'll be able to resist the opportunity to write about something on those off days anyway, that's another story.

In addition to using some of my new black and white work starting in a few weeks Monkette wanted me to mention that she has a cute little itty-bitty toy monkey herself now! He still doesn't have a name but I'm sure that Monkette will think up a good one for him. He'll soon start showing up here in the pictures.

Proposed Changes And News About The Blog

With the help of Todd Frederick this has been a very successful blog. He's the one who posts the photographs, and in many cases he's used his Photoshop skills to restore the color in some very badly faded color slides from forty or more years ago.

When The Price of Silver first started several years ago it was all old B&W photographs, everything from politics to rock & roll, with a few personal pictures as well. From the begining there were a few paragraphs of copy with every photo, sometimes serious, sometimes tongue-in-cheek. At some point I started with the self-portrait thing when I discovered it was possible to do it with a 15mm ultra-wide angle lens. We then switched to mostly all color. I was hardly going in the darkroom anymore. Todd was getting on my case about that, and Monkette was threatening to cut off my banana supply.

A few weeks ago I met the owner of a new gallery here in North Miami, showed him some of my work, and it's looking like I'll have a bunch of my prints hanging in a group show starting July 12th. I'll post more details in a few days.

As I thought about what to show at the Suyu Gallery I decided that I wanted to stay with black and white prints, but I also wanted to show something more recent than the 1970's. Last night I was mulling things over in my head, what to do, what to shoot, how to do it. I decided that I wanted to show both new and old work. The new work would be based on older photos but printed up with some new techniques. They'd still be traditional silver gelatin prints of course.

In the meantime here on the blog we have a few months supply of those 15mm color shots on hand, but they'll likely be mixed in with the experimental black and white photographs. We'll also be likely to cut back to three or four blog entries a week instead of the killer daily pace. As best we can tell we've already set a record for photography blogs, both as to longevity and for consistancy of posting on a regular basis. If you visit us and there's nothing new that day you can be sure that there will be the next day, so stop back.

Lastly, thanks for your kind comments and emails. Keep them coming. They make all this worthwhile! Todd, Monkette, and I thank you.