Did You Lose Your Head?

The last Friday of the month North Miami hosts an outdoor jazz concert downtown by the art museum. The museum and all the nearby art galleries stay open late, showing their new exhibits. I went into Mario's gallery and was surprised to see this crocodile skull being displayed as art. Mario must know something about "art" that I don't know. The skull was the only thing with a sold tag on it from the git-go.

A few months ago he was displaying the jaw bone of a donkey all bleached white from the sun. All the teeth were still in place, but loose in their sockets so they rattled when you shook it. He showed me how in his native Peru the jawbone is used as a rythm instrument. You hold it in one hand, shake it, and every few beats you bang it into the palm of your other hand.

I can't imagine myself trying to explain to a city code enforcemet officer "Oh! The dead donkey in my back yard? The one rotting in the sun? I'm just making some musical instruments. It usually only stinks really bad for the first couple of weeks."

Maggie's Gallery

I had a couple of friends who didn't know one another but they both used the same attorney, so I soon got to meet Jerry Weisberg, and he was looking for a photographer to shoot pictures for various cases he had. His office was in Coconut Grove, the "arty" part of Miami back then. I was in the Grove frequently, met people on my own and got introduced to others. One of them was this young woman who'd just opened an art gallery. I'm pretty sure that her name was Maggie, but 1968 was forty years ago. I'm also pretty sure that my friend John Patteson was the one who shot the photo with my Leica. He and I used to go down to the Grove together all the time.

The guy on the right, an artist, was Dutch and had a pretty strong accent but I can't remember his name*. This was probably the only time I'd ever met him. The guy on the left with the long hair was me. We were going through a bunch of my photographs trying to decide which ones to include in an exhibit.

*23 Feb. 2009 ~ I just got an email from Al Olme, one of my closest friends back in those days. Al wrote that the guy's name is Renis Opstal. Neither of us are sure of the spelling but it does seem to sound right. Hey Renis! If you run across this please post a comment on the blog or send me an email. preacherpop42@aol.com Thanks!

Beyond The Camera Into Uncharted Territory

When Mario Flores, the owner of Rootz Gallery here in North Miami, asked me if I could put together an assortment of prints for an exhibit I said "Sure! No problem!" I knew that I had lots of prints on hand. I usually make more than one print when somebody orders one. It's easier to make more right then at the time than to go back and do it later, and usually a print that sells will also appeal to others. In fact, when people see a framed print hanging at somebody's home or office they start to think about how nice it would look hanging on one of their own walls. And people have come to appreciate the look of a gelatin silver print.

Putting the show together would mostly be a matter of going through some boxes and envelopes, picking out the pictures and sticking them in frames. I picked them out. I stuck them in frames. They were all photographs I'd made back in the 1960's and '70's, and most of them were printed back then too.

Scroll down one post and you can see a couple of those images. While at the gallery I'd been looking at some paintings with strange effects of splattered paint, smeared together colors, and started wondering if that might be something that could be done with a gelatin silver print. But how?

I let my brain chew on it for a few days, then BANG!, the coming together of the idea and a way that it might be done exploded in my head. I soon was in the darkroom, so excited that I was looking for the right negative even before the air conditioner had a chance to cool the July heat. Here it is a couple of months later and I still don't have it perfected as much as I'd like but I like what I'm doing, I love the prints that I'm making, and other people seem to like them too. We added three of the new prints to hang alongside the older work. You can see one of them in this picture that Mario shot of me holding my Leica. He was using a Nikon DSLR.

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.

City Planning Running Amok

Well, first off, I'm hijacking my own post here. It was supposed to be talking about Mario's new art gallery and photo studio, how it's located where Jaybo's Photo Lab stood for perhaps twenty-five years, eventually expanding into a complete photography shop, everything from film, paper and chemistry to darkroom equipment and high end cameras such as Leica and Nikon. Be cool Mario! I have more photos, I'm impressed with your place, your work, and your plans, so I'll be revisiting you in upcoming blog posts.

What has me upset is the state and county road departments coming into North Miami and revamping our street system, creating a can't-get-here-from-there maze of one way streets and right-turn-only intersections. The on-street parking along here? Gone! Instead there's a small lot in back and a shiny new back door that looks like a front door. If you can find the place! Of course back doors along alleyways usually are massive ugly burgler proof things so a bad guy lurking in the shadows won't break in with ease. Now they expect the shop owners to have nice pretty glass doors in the alleys? Get real!

They may well be state roads or county roads, and they're the ones paying to upgrade them, even adding landscaped traffic islands, but they have no concept of reality. They're not doing the business owners, or the citizens trying to find their way around, any favors!

As for the term "running amok"?

Running amok - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Running amok, sometimes referred to as simply amok (also spelled amuck or amuk), is derived from the Malay/Indonesian word amuk, meaning "mad with rage" ...

There are plenty of people trying to find their way around, or just a place to park, and they're mad with rage!