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.

A Photography Exhibit At MOCA, North Miami's Museum Of Contemprary Art

It wasn't all that long ago that museums rarely exhibited photography at all, and then only the work of long established photographers, or at least somebody who already had the right credentials in the art world. Few and far between were people who collected photograhic prints as art or displayed the pieces in their homes or offices. All that has changed in the past few years.

North Miami's Museum of Contemporary Art had their opening patrty for a group photography show and I decided to check it out. There was a large variety of work shown, arranged so that each exhibter had their own space on the walls. Some of them liked to print large while others preferred smaller more intimate style begging you to get close to admire the prints. They were mostly silver gelatin prints but one of the photographers showed platinum prints. One showed prints mounted on aluminum, but conventional matted and framed pictures dominated the show. The food table seemed to be getting the most attention.